PRIVATE BUSINESS

Medway Council Bill

Considered; to be read the Third time.

Oral Answers to Questions

SCOTLAND

The Secretary of State was asked—

Road Fuel Taxation

Andrew Selous: When he last met the Chancellor of the Exchequer to discuss the effects of road fuel taxation on business in Scotland.

Alistair Darling: I have regular discussions with my right hon. Friend on a wide range of issues.

Andrew Selous: The respective pre-pump prices, excluding taxes and duties, of unleaded petrol and ultra-low sulphur diesel are 20p and 21p. Last year, the Chancellor said that he would not proceed with fuel duty rate increases if the international oil situation remained volatile. What hope can the Secretary of State give to hauliers and motorists in Scotland and throughout the UK that the Chancellor will keep his word?

Alistair Darling: The hon. Gentleman has picked his day carefully—today, oil prices have fallen to a two-month low following the handover of sovereignty in Iraq. Oil prices are currently volatile and high because of a combination of factors, including not only uncertainty in Iraq and the middle east, but increased demand from the United States, China and other countries. The Chancellor has said that he will examine oil prices and review the situation in August.
	Conservative Members should concentrate on why petrol prices have increased, which is because of oil prices rather than sudden increases in duty. We must wait and see what happens in the summer, but the Government's action in encouraging the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase production, coupled with the progress that we have made in Iraq, is helping to exert downward pressure on oil prices, which in turn will help pump prices.

John McFall: The Government have cut the fuel tax escalator that the previous Government imposed. Does the Secretary of State accept that environmental issues such as climate change are important and that a sensitive balance must be reached? Those who fought against protestors in the late 1980s are now inciting people needlessly to riot, which is a sorry sight.

Alistair Darling: My hon. Friend is right that one must take a wide range of issues into account in considering the taxation of fuel. A few weeks ago, the Conservative party showed its opportunism at its worst: instead of joining others in encouraging OPEC to increase oil production, it made opportunistic demands, but Conservative Members know that they would take a completely different view if they were in government.

Peter Duncan: The Prime Minister has indicated that the Government will review September's proposed 2p rise in fuel tax in August. Just so that ordinary Scots know how strong their voice is in Cabinet, are there any circumstances in which the Secretary of State would intervene and advocate abandoning that tax hike? Today's press says that desks are being thumped throughout Downing street; are there any circumstances in which the Secretary of State would thump his desk?

Alistair Darling: In our Department, desks are not thumped—they are too valuable. Just as I am determined to bear down on the Scotland Office's hospitality budget, I will not rack up bills by damaging my desk. People, whether they are hauliers or motorists, are, of course, concerned about fuel prices, but it is important to concentrate on the causes of the oil price increase, which, as I said, are increased demand from certain parts of the world and events in Iraq and the middle east. I recognise that we have a long way to go, but the recent fall in oil prices is welcome. Brent crude is currently trading at just more than $33 a barrel, which is much better than a few weeks ago. The Chancellor has said that he will keep the situation under review and, as he indicated earlier this year, he will make a decision in August.

Jim Sheridan: My right hon. Friend will be aware of the threatened protests throughout Scotland should fuel tax increase. Will he assure the House that those protestors will face the same level of law enforcement that trade unionists faced when they defended their communities in the 1980s?

Alistair Darling: It is important that anyone who demonstrates abides by the law and does what they are asked to do by the police and other authorities. Of course people have a right to object, but they must do so within the framework of the law.

John Thurso: In my constituency and in many other remote rural areas where road transport is a necessity, fuel costs, on average, 10p more than it does in urban areas such as Inverness and Edinburgh. Is the Secretary of State aware that EC directives 92/81 and 92/82 contain derogations to allow for lower tax to cover precisely that situation? Why do not the Government act to end that penalty in remote areas, and what is his Department doing to persuade the Treasury to that end?

Alistair Darling: The Liberals always give the impression that they want fuel prices to go up for environmental reasons—except, of course, in their own constituencies. As for the hon. Gentleman's proposal, it would give rise to difficulties were the Government to decide that fuel tax should be lower in one area than another. There will always be an argument about where the line is drawn. The hon. Gentleman's proposition is not practical, and were we to act on it I suspect that he would be the first to complain about where the line was drawn.

Pete Wishart: Despite today's welcome news about oil prices, 77 per cent. of the price of a litre of fuel is still taken up by taxes and duties. Does the Secretary of State think that that figure is too high or too low, and does he think that there could still be a case for a further 2p hike in fuel prices for Scottish motorists?

Alistair Darling: As I said, the Government's position is that we are keeping the situation under review and the Chancellor will make his decision in August. That seems to me to be the right way to approach these matters.

Proceeds of Crime Act

Russell Brown: What discussions he has had with the First Minister about returning cash seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 to local communities worst affected by the criminals.

Alistair Darling: As my hon. Friend will know, that is a matter for the Scottish Executive, but I know that they are determined that recovered criminal assets must be used to benefit the communities that suffer from drug dealing.

Russell Brown: I thank my right hon. Friend for his response. About 50 per cent. of all assets seized in Scotland have been seized through the good work of Dumfries and Galloway constabulary, which also led to the largest ever UK seizure through the civil recovery aspect of the Act. I appreciate that this is a matter for the Scottish Executive; nevertheless, when my right hon. Friend speaks to the First Minister will he impress upon him that some of that money must find its way back to the local communities that have been so badly damaged through criminal activities, and especially drug dealing which is rife in many parts of the country?

Alistair Darling: I am aware of the seizures that have taken place in the south-west of Scotland and my hon. Friend is right to pay tribute to the chief constable and his police force in Dumfries and Galloway. For many years—indeed, ever since he has been the Member for Dumfries—my hon. Friend has expressed his concern about the impact of drug dealing on communities. Of course, I talk to the First Minister about such matters. It is difficult to have an exact correlation between where the money is seized and where it is paid back, because the place where it is seized may not be the scene where so many crimes have been committed and communities have suffered. The Scottish Executive is talking to the Treasury about the exact percentage that is retained and repaid. The general principle of the legislation is absolutely right, and it is a great pity that Opposition Members were so reluctant to support us.

Ian Davidson: Notwithstanding the fact that many of these responsibilities lie with the Scottish Executive, this House has responsibility for regulating and dealing with professionals. Given that the amount of money that has been seized is lower than might have been expected, what steps is my right hon. Friend taking to deal with professional associations representing accountants, bankers and lawyers, which often act to assist criminals by hiding their assets and preventing their being seized?

Alistair Darling: I am tempted to declare an interest, but it has, sadly, been some years since I practised, although the register shows that I am still a member of the Faculty of Advocates. I am still practising politics, however.
	My hon. Friend makes an important point. As he will know, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is considering various measures to attempt to deal with some of the problems that he highlights. There is a balance to be struck between maintaining confidentiality between clients and professionals and dealing with situations involving abuse of the system.

Regional Selective Assistance

Michael Moore: What discussions he has held with the Department of Trade and Industry on the future of regional selective assistance.

Anne McGuire: I met ministerial colleagues last week when the European Commission's proposals for amending the guidelines that govern regional state aid from 1 January 2007 were discussed. The Government's approach to responding to the Commission regarding the proposals was set out by the Minister for Industry and the Regions in a written statement on 14 June.

Michael Moore: In the borders over the past few years, more than £6 million of regional selective assistance has created more than 200 jobs and safeguarded at least another 1,000. Does the Under-Secretary recognise the importance of that funding in the aftermath of the debacles at Biosytems and in the textile industry? Will she ensure that however RSA is to be restructured, the needs of rural manufacturing economies, such as that of the south-east of Scotland, will not be ignored?

Anne McGuire: We are well aware of the importance of regional selective assistance to many areas in Scotland. Approximately 48 per cent. of Scotland is covered by RSA. I know that specific issues apply in the borders. In our discussions with the Commission, the Government hope to identify effective, regional targeting while ensuring that some of the most deprived and disadvantaged areas are given the economic support that they need. I encourage the hon. Gentleman and his party to make their views known in the consultation period that the Minister for Industry and the Regions announced.

David Cairns: Has my hon. Friend had a chance to study the report of the West of Scotland European Consortium, which makes a compelling case for continuing assistance to the west of Scotland, due to deprivation and social exclusion that are higher than average? Will she assure me that whatever the future holds for regional assistance, the needs of constituencies such as Inverclyde, which have higher than average unemployment and poverty, will be borne in mind?

Anne McGuire: I have had a glance at the document that my hon. Friend mentions. I have not read it in detail, but I endorse his views. As someone who served on the monitoring committee of the former Strathclyde objective 2 partnership, I know the importance of European funding, through structural funds and regional selective assistance, to areas such as my hon. Friend's constituency. It is one of the aspects of European partnership that is clear to people not only in Scotland but throughout the United Kingdom. It is one of the benefits of European partnership and membership of the European Union that the Conservative party often neglects to mention.

Dungavel Centre

John Robertson: What recent discussions he has had with the First Minister on the Dungavel immigration removal centre.

Anne McGuire: The operation of Dungavel immigration removal centre is a reserved matter and the responsibility of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. However, I have regular meetings with Home Office and Scottish Executive Ministers to discuss any specific concerns surrounding asylum seekers and refugees in Scotland.

John Robertson: My hon. Friend knows that the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, of which I am a member, visited Dungavel last week. We were impressed with the facilities and the commitment of the staff. Will she join me in congratulating the staff on their efforts and assure me that any families in Dungavel will be detained for as short a period as possible?

Anne McGuire: I welcome my hon. Friend's comments and I am sure that the staff in Dungavel will also welcome them. Some of the pictures that the media paint of Dungavel in no way reflect the high quality of service that good people provide there to refugees and asylum seekers who need support.
	Of course, the Government continue to pay the greatest possible attention to the detention of families. I assure hon. Members that families are detained only as a last possible resort. In Dungavel, we try to turn families around quickly, although there have been one or two exceptional circumstances. It is important to acknowledge that, in any immigration structure, there eventually needs to be a place in which to hold people in the system. However, the facilities in Dungavel are first class and superb.

Annabelle Ewing: At Scottish questions recently, the Under-Secretary welcomed the fact that the new Children's Commissioner for Scotland intended to visit Dungavel. She knows that the commissioner has visited and that she said at the weekend that she wholeheartedly agreed with the conclusion of the chief inspector of prisons that detention compromises children's welfare and development. What does the Under-Secretary say in response to the commissioner's comments?

Anne McGuire: The commissioner also said that the facilities inside Dungavel were good. She was there at the express invitation of the Home Secretary, as I said at the last Scottish questions. Yes, the commissioner is on record as saying that she does not believe in principle that children should be detained, and that is a difference that we have with some groups in Scotland about the detention of children. The reality is that if the hon. Lady's party were in charge of immigration in Scotland, it, too, would have to put in place a structure to deal with those who were unwilling to accept the outcome of the immigration or asylum process. I am due to meet the commissioner quite soon and I shall be interested to hear her views first hand, rather than through the media.

John Lyons: May I suggest to my hon. Friend that a joint meeting between the Scottish Executive, the Scotland Office and the Children's Commissioner, Kathleen Marshall, might be constructive in developing a way forward for dealing with the question of children at Dungavel?

Anne McGuire: I reiterate that the management of Dungavel is a matter for the Home Office, although we obviously link very closely with the Scottish Executive and Home Office Ministers over some of the issues that I have already identified. I have had correspondence with the Children's Commissioner and, as a courtesy, we are meeting to discuss some of the issues that are causing her concern. I want to reassure my hon. Friend and other hon. Members that the Scottish Executive, Home Office Ministers and I meet regularly to discuss these issues, which are important not only to this House but in Scotland generally.

Peter Duncan: Having visited the centre recently, may I say to the Minister that one of its strengths is the separation between the centre's detention staff and the Home Office officials dealing with the legal process? However much those detained endeavour to destabilise the process, they are in my view still treated with the same concern. May I seek the Minister's reassurance that there are no plans to change that two-pronged relationship, as has been reported?

Anne McGuire: There was a report in a national daily newspaper that the Home Office intended to extend Dungavel to provide a further 150 places for families, and it is totally untrue.

Peter Duncan: Does the Minister agree that she and her Department would be under considerably less pressure over Dungavel if the wider asylum issue were not in such widespread chaos? Is not the real scandal the fact that so many of those awaiting removal have had to wait so long for the legal process to be concluded, in the knowledge that so many others have evaded the process entirely?

Anne McGuire: The real scandal is that when the Conservative party was in power, it allowed our immigration and asylum policy to descend into chaos. We have had to sort it out. The reality is that immigration and asylum cases are now being dealt with in a far more effective and efficient manner than they ever were under the Conservative Government.

Health and Safety Executive

Ann McKechin: When he last had discussions with the Health and Safety Executive on its work in Scotland.

Alistair Darling: Ministers have had discussions with a number of organisations in relation to their work in Scotland.

Ann McKechin: Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that while the number of fatalities and major accidents at work in the rest of the United Kingdom has decreased, the number in Scotland has increased in recent years, and that the rate of deaths in the workplace in Scotland is 95 per cent. higher than the average for Great Britain? What discussions has he had with the Health and Safety Executive in Scotland about the resources that it requires to tackle that issue, and to ensure that accidents in the workplace decrease significantly in Scotland?

Alistair Darling: My hon. Friend is right to raise this issue. There is no intrinsic reason why the number of accidents in the workplace in Scotland should be greater. In particular, the number of people injured on construction sites in Scotland is much higher than on sites in England. The Health and Safety Executive is investigating the issue and carrying out research into why this is happening. It has also been agreed that the HSE, in conjunction with the Scottish Executive, will set up a joint piece of work to examine how the situation can be improved. In addition to what the Government can do, there must be a reminder to everyone involved in a workplace—a construction site or elsewhere—that safety can and must be improved. There are still too many people being killed and seriously injured at work in Scotland, and that should not be happening.

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation

David Marshall: What plans he has to meet the Scottish Executive to discuss the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation; and if he will make a statement.

Anne McGuire: My right hon. Friend and I meet regularly with Scottish Executive Ministers to discuss a wide range of issues. We welcome publication of the index as a valuable tool in tackling poverty for both reserved and devolved areas of responsibility.

David Marshall: May I say to my hon. Friend that I am 63 years old and live in the Shettleston constituency—[Laughter.] Adult male life expectancy there is just that—63. Tragically, because this is no laughing matter, that is 14 years fewer than the UK national average, and it is partly due to poverty in the area. Six of the 10 most deprived areas in Scotland are in Glasgow's east end, where 20,000 people are unemployed. Does she therefore agree that the No. 1 priority must be the education and training of the unemployed, and will she assure the House that she and the Government will do all that they can to help the Scottish Executive to deal with and tackle this very serious situation?

Anne McGuire: In spite of the raucous response to my hon. Friend's question, by drawing attention to his age he makes a serious point about the difficulties in some parts of the United Kingdom, including his constituency. I hope that he will take confidence from the fact that we are tackling some of the major issues, which are mainly related to unemployment and poverty, not only in his constituency but across Scotland. More children have dropped out of poverty over the past seven years of a Labour Government, following the dramatic increases that had occurred in children and their families dropping into low income. I hope that that will give him reassurance for the future. I wish him many future happy returns.

ADVOCATE-GENERAL FOR SCOTLAND

The Advocate-General was asked—

Devolution

Ann McKechin: What devolution issues she has considered since 25 May.

Anne McIntosh: What devolution issues she has considered since 25 May.

Lynda Clark: Since 25 May, 48 devolution issues have been intimated to me. Thirty-six of those related to criminal matters, including pre-trial delay, self-incrimination under the Road Traffic Act 1988, regulatory fisheries offences and evidential issues. In the civil sphere, 12 issues were intimated, 11 of which related to actions for damages or judicial review in respect of prison conditions, while the last concerned a challenge to the discretion of the procurator fiscal.

Ann McKechin: May I ask my hon. and learned Friend whether she has had any discussions with the new Children's Commissioner for Scotland, Dr. Kathleen Marshall, who was referred to earlier today, in connection with the concerns that she has expressed about human rights issues arising from the new antisocial behaviour legislation that has recently passed through the Scottish Parliament? If she has not had any such discussions, does she intend to meet her later this summer?

Lynda Clark: To date, I have had no discussions with the commissioner. The matters that my hon. Friend raises relate to policy, which would usually be discussed with policy Ministers, not with me. Obviously, were there any legal issues to be addressed, that might be a different matter.

Anne McIntosh: Has the hon. and learned Lady's advice been sought, however, on the positioning and the legal situation as regards the construction of wind farms in international shipping lanes in Scotland? In the event of a wind farm being built and a fisherman colliding with it, who would be responsible for that collision?

Lynda Clark: The hon. Lady knows full well that I cannot tell the House whether my advice has been sought.

Eric Forth: Not again.

Lynda Clark: I am afraid so. I am happy to discuss privately with the hon. Lady general issues relating to the statutory structure, if that would be of assistance to her.

George Foulkes: May I congratulate the Advocate-General on the splendid job that she is doing? She will be a very difficult act to follow. Will she also pass on my congratulations to the Lord Advocate on the great improvement that there has been in the Scottish Procurator Fiscal Service? Can she also tell him that if he needs any heavyweight support, I will be free after the next election?

Lynda Clark: I can only say that those kind words were entirely unsolicited. I shall be more than happy to pass on my right hon. Friend's good wishes and thanks to the Lord Advocate.

Human Rights

Tam Dalyell: What human rights issues she has considered since 25 May.

Lynda Clark: In addition to the human rights issues raised in the devolution issue minutes to which I referred some moments ago, as a matter of routine such matters were considered by me in my role under section 33 of the Scotland Act 1998 and in my capacity as a United Kingdom Law Officer.

Tam Dalyell: Given that Mr. Eddie McKechnie, acting in furtherance of the human rights of Mr. Megrahi, is hopeful that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission is giving the most serious and painstaking consideration to that complex case, does my hon. and learned Friend think that the House of Commons will have a role when the commission reports? I do not criticise Members of the Scottish Parliament, but it is clear that none of them have bothered to become immersed in what is a very complex issue.

Lynda Clark: I am sure that many Members of this Parliament, as individuals, will read the commission's report with great interest when it is available. I think that these matters will generally be regarded as devolved, but I am sure that, with his great experience, my hon. Friend will find a way of raising the issues that concern him in the House.

Patrick McLoughlin: Will the Advocate-General review the answers that she has given in the House over the past six months? Does she believe that her Question Time has added anything to parliamentary accountability?

Lynda Clark: I think that Question Time has resulted in a most interesting and stimulating debate. I have certainly enjoyed it. I am particularly grateful to Opposition Members, who have raised so many questions with me. I shall be delighted to review the answers, but I remind Members that the conventions which prohibit me from giving details of opinions are not created by me—they are long-standing conventions, which Members have also supported.

DEPARTMENT FOR CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State was asked—

Postal Voting

Ann Winterton: What assessment the Department has made of the efficacy of the recent trials for postal voting in the north-west of England.

Christopher Leslie: The recent trials of postal voting in four regions of England proved worth while. Turnouts increased throughout the country, but were appreciably higher in the all-postal areas, where they doubled in comparison with those for the previous European elections. The Electoral Commission is statutorily obliged to evaluate the pilots. No doubt lessons will be learned from its report, which is due in mid-September.

Ann Winterton: Experience has shown that turnouts increase initially after all-postal ballots, but then fall back. Turnout increased on this occasion because there were two elections on the same day, the European and the local elections. Will the Minister acknowledge the incidence of costly administrative chaos, postal delays in some areas and alleged fraud? Will he ensure that while opportunities for postal voting will continue to be provided, the traditional democratic right to vote in person at a polling station will always be maintained in the future?

Christopher Leslie: Of course the right to cast a vote in the polling booth was maintained in the all-postal ballots, via the assistance and delivery points. There was an issue over whether there were enough of those, and we could think about that for the future.
	Part of the reason for the increased turnout was our decision to combine the European and local elections, but comparison of pilot with non-pilot regions shows an appreciably higher turnout than under the conventional arrangements. We organise pilots because we want to learn lessons. We are trying out these arrangements because we want to find ways of dealing with the historic lower turnouts that have occurred in recent elections. I think that that is the right thing to do, and it has certainly proved worth while.

Keith Vaz: The trials were very successful in Leicester. Turnout increased in all three Leicester constituencies—[Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. Members must let the hon. Gentleman put his question. When the Minister replies, he too should be heard.

Keith Vaz: Turnout was up in all three Leicester constituencies, especially Leicester, South, where a lot of people turned out to vote against the cuts instituted by the Liberal Democrat administration. However, will my hon. Friend look at the guidance in respect of making ballot boxes available on the day for those who missed the postal deadline? Only one ballot box was provided by the returning officer, which was at the town hall in the city centre. Parking was extremely difficult, so many people could not return their ballot papers. Could we not have, at the very minimum, a ballot box in each parliamentary constituency to make them more accessible to those who cannot vote except on polling day?

Christopher Leslie: The point of having an all-postal pilot was to test the extent to which the dispatch of ballot papers to the electorate through the post helped to make it easier and more convenient for them to vote. If we had provided the same number of polling stations as before, it would have negated slightly the effect of testing the efficacy of all-postal balloting. I accept that many hon. Members have noted that they would have preferred more assistance and delivery points, and that is obviously something that will come out in the Electoral Commission's evaluation.
	I also heard my hon. Friend's comments about the cuts that the Liberal Democrats have proposed in Leicester, but that is a debate for another day.

David Heath: It is extraordinary that the Government are yet again disregarding the views of the Electoral Commission in respect of the referendums.
	May I take the Minister back to the statement that he made on 27 May? He said:
	"I am confident that the deadlines to hand over packs to the Royal Mail will be met."—[Official Report, 27 May 2004; Vol. 421, c. 1735.]
	Will he confirm that the contracts let with Royal Mail required those packs to be in its hands on 25 May, two days before he made that statement? Will he apologise to the House for clearly misleading it in that respect? Will he tell us whether any penalty clauses are attached to the Royal Mail contracts, and if so, who will be responsible: the printers, the Government, whose fault this whole debacle was, or the hard-pressed council tax payers of the north of England?

Christopher Leslie: What a shame that, in attempting to perpetuate the story about the supposed chaos and shambles of all-postal voting that both Opposition parties have tried to peddle, the hon. Gentleman seeks to accuse me of somehow misleading the House, which I certainly did not. I underlined the fact that in law, the ballot papers needed to be dispatched to the deliverers from the returning officers by midnight on 1 June. That is in fact what happened to all intents and purposes, and within a few hours of that deadline, the papers were issued. There may well have been different contractual arrangements from area to area and from returning officer to returning officer, but the legal position and legal requirements that I set out were absolutely clear. I am glad that that was a success and that we were able to ensure that those papers were issued, to all intents and purposes, by that deadline.

Peter Pike: Will my hon. Friend confirm that the Government's two main priorities in using postal voting are to ensure that a larger number of people use their vote, which is good for democracy, and to ensure the integrity of the vote? Later in the year, when we have the report showing the advantages, the disadvantages and where we can improve on what was done in June, may we have a full debate on it? There is merit in taking this matter forward and we can learn from what happened this month.

Christopher Leslie: My hon. Friend makes some reasonable points and I am sure that we will debate the Electoral Commission's report and evaluation in due course. From some of the comments from Opposition parties, one would have thought that we were criminal in trying to address the problems of lower turnout, engagement and participation by the electorate. We have come up with the solution of trying out new techniques to engage the public, while the Opposition parties have developed no ideas or proposals whatever to engage the public more in the electoral system. That is a great pity.

Jonathan Djanogly: With allegations of corruption, vote tampering and voter manipulation now growing, with 20,000 spoiled ballot papers in the north-west region alone, and with concerns about the huge confusion emanating from postal voting, is the Minister really going to maintain that a short-term, marginal, 5 per cent. improvement in turnout is worth the collapse of confidence in our voting system that postal voting could entail?

Christopher Leslie: The issues about spoiled ballot papers are separate from the constant repetition of claims of fraud and malpractice. I note that, again, the hon. Gentleman has produced no evidence, but is simply perpetuating rumour, story and things that have been heard on the grapevine. If that is good enough for the Opposition, it is certainly not good enough for the police, who need to see the evidence immediately—if the hon. Gentleman has those reports. I trust that he will now produce such evidence immediately to the police, if he has it. There have been no charges yet in respect of any electoral offences in the pilot regions and no legal proceedings, despite the scare stories and the doom and gloom that we heard from Opposition Members.
	I accept that the Electoral Commission will need to look at the question of spoiled ballot papers; the witness statement requirement that was foisted on the Bill by Opposition Members may well be responsible for some of that.

Gordon Prentice: We all want to boost turnout, but why can we not pilot weekend voting? Why can we not pilot Thursday voting, but make Thursday a public holiday? There are alternative ways of approaching this issue, without jeopardising the secrecy of the ballot.

Christopher Leslie: Nobody has jeopardised the secrecy of the ballot, but I accept that my hon. Friend has other suggestions that he would like to try out. In fact, we trialled weekend voting in Watford in 2003, but no appreciable effect was proven there. The right approach is to test new arrangements that make it easier and more convenient for people to participate in elections, while always maintaining the security and safety of the electoral process.

House of Lords

Simon Burns: If he will make a statement on the future of reform of the House of Lords.

Christopher Leslie: The Government remain committed to reform of the House of Lords, but to proceed now in the face of current opposition in the Lords could jeopardise the wider legislative programme. However, the Government are determined to take this matter forward and to find a consensus that defends the Commons supremacy and the proper revising role of the second Chamber.

Simon Burns: Does the Minister accept that, just as no one has been able to find a solution to the West Lothian problem, there is growing concern that a similar problem will arise with reform of the House of Lords, because no one can come up with a credible solution to altering the balance of power between the two Chambers, and to the consequent problems? In order to provide a solution once and for all, why do the Government not support the Prime Minister in his preferred option and just continue appointing Members of the House of Lords?

Christopher Leslie: I am not quite sure that that is the Prime Minister's total view, but I always support him in all eventualities, as all Members are well aware by now. However, the hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point in part, in that it is possible to square the issues of improved legitimacy for the second Chamber and maintaining Commons supremacy. There is a consensus that we want this House of Commons to be the final decision maker. At the same time, it is important that we find a way to improve connection with the public so far as the second Chamber's composition is concerned, while ensuring that it continues in its revising role.

Tony Wright: There is a view in some quarters that it would be better to have a half-baked scheme than no scheme at all. Will my hon. Friend resist that view and remember that it has taken us nearly a century to come up with House of Lords reform that has some chance of working? It would be better to get it right in a form that can command widespread support.

Christopher Leslie: That was a cryptic question from my hon. Friend, but I shall not demur from answering it. He is correct to say that it is better to get a solution that works well. As I said earlier, it is possible to square Commons supremacy with improved legitimacy for the second Chamber, and we will continue to press ahead in looking for a consensus on that point.

Douglas Hogg: Does the hon. Gentleman understand that many of us are very concerned about the influence and power of the Whips in this House and therefore want to extend the powers of the second Chamber? Does he also understand that in order to do that, he has to give greater political legitimacy to the second Chamber? That would involve either a complete or very substantial election process by a direct franchise from the people.

Christopher Leslie: Of course, the whipping system already exists in the second Chamber. The right hon. and learned Gentleman comments on the situation whereby those who are elected might be more prone to the persuasions of the whipping system than others, but I am not convinced. Each individual takes a decision according to their own conscience—just as the right hon. and learned Gentleman did not always necessarily obey the Whip when it was waved under his nose.

Graham Allen: May I urge my hon. Friend to continue his search for a consensus and a scheme for the reform of the second Chamber? It would be unacceptable to go into the next election without a clear manifesto commitment from our party on that question. I therefore urge him to meet, if he has not already met, Mr. Billy Bragg, who proposes one form of a scheme that may command a consensus. Will he undertake to meet Billy Bragg and many others who have views on how best to take a step forward with this knotty problem?

Christopher Leslie: I have already met Mr. Billy Bragg and hon. Members who advocate the secondary mandate scheme, as they term it. That proposal is designed to improve the legitimacy of the second Chamber without direct election. My hon. Friend's point about our manifesto is correct. I believe that we should develop proposals and he should wait and see what appears in the manifesto.

Freedom of Information Act

Norman Baker: What progress is being made in implementing the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

David Lammy: The Government are making good progress on implementation of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. An extensive programme of work is taking place in Whitehall and beyond, and we are confident of full and effective implementation by 1 January 2005.

Norman Baker: Has the Minister had a chance to consider early-day motion 1269, tabled by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Tony Wright), which has secured the support of 151 MPs? It expresses grave concern about the massive increase in projected costs for accessing information under the Freedom of Information Act. Does the Minister recognise that charging £575 for a piece of information is likely to deter people from using the Act? Is it simply a matter of petty Treasury money-grabbing policy, or is it something more sinister—an attempt to ensure that people do not exercise their rights under the Act so that it is not effective in its operation?

David Lammy: The hon. Gentleman will know that we will bring forward our plans for the fee regime later in the autumn. He will also know that the Government are aware of their previous commitment that the fees should reflect appropriately on the public purse.

Electoral Roll

Desmond Swayne: What assessment the Department has made of the integrity of the electoral roll following the postal ballots in the recent elections.

Christopher Leslie: The new powers given to electoral registration officers in 2001 have helped to safeguard the accuracy of the electoral register. Further security improvements, including individual rather than household registration, are being actively considered as part of an ongoing review, but not specifically related to one election.

Desmond Swayne: Does the Minister accept that the robustness of the register is vital to minimising fraud? Does he agree that confidence in our electoral system is not so much determined by a relatively low number of proven cases of fraud as by the perception that our systems largely exclude the possibility for it?

Christopher Leslie: I agree with the hon. Gentleman in respect of the electoral roll. The accuracy of the register is vital as the foundation of our democratic system. We have made improvements by giving new powers to electoral registration officers to demand information and to be able to ask for specified evidence of age, nationality and so forth. Of course, they also have the power not to include people on the electoral roll. In this country, we largely operate on the basis of trust and believe that citizens will fill in their forms correctly, but we have to ensure that we always improve security whenever possible.

Alan Duncan: As the Minister said, the electoral roll is the foundation of any smoothly functioning democratic process. If that is distorted, everything that follows risks becoming polluted as well. Suggestions have been made that some electoral rolls are overstated with ineligible names, particularly in urban areas, to the tune of 10 or even 15 per cent. That has serious implications for all-postal voting and for the setting of boundaries for seats in the House. Will the Minister confirm that he will accelerate the introduction of individual voter registration and that, when it is introduced, it will require the person's name, address, date of birth, national insurance number and signature to authenticate genuine voters and remove the ineligible ones?

Christopher Leslie: That is something that we are discussing, not least with the Electoral Commission, which has proposed individual registration for some time. One problem that needs to be overcome is the extra burden that individual registration would place on citizens. Instead of each household filling in a form, each individual would have to fill in an extra form. That may be necessary and it may have merit, but a possible consequence is that people might fall off the electoral roll, and we would not want that to happen. We must make sure that individual registration is accurate, and that it legitimately enfranchises as many people as possible. I think that we can get that balance right. We are trying to solve the problem and we will bring forward proposals in due course.

Tesco (Legal Products)

David Taylor: What representations the Department has received from the legal profession on the legal products the Tesco supermarket chain plans to put on sale.

David Lammy: My Department has received no such representations, but it looks favourably on initiatives that offer people wider access to straightforward information about legal issues. My Department has been in discussion for some time with retailers about the role that they might play in that process.

David Taylor: Even experienced purchasers of professional services find it difficult to assess the quality and integrity of their lawyers. The Clementi review of the regulatory framework of legal services might sanction a supermarket approach to justice. If so, does my hon. Friend agree that although a pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap ethos might appear to offer choice and value, in reality it could lead to costly mistakes? That would be not unlike the bogus consumerism promoted by both Front-Bench teams in education and health.

David Lammy: Clearly, I cannot comment on David Clementi's report, which the Government asked him to produce but which will not be ready until later in the year. Of course I welcome the provision by Tesco, or any supermarket retailer, of information to consumers. That information concerns matters such as tenancy agreements, the writing of wills—something that we all want—and, for people whose family circumstances have broken down, divorce. We should wait and see what David Clementi comes up with, but also recognise that the current arrangements—which mean that the Law Society and the Bar Council are the regulator, the disciplinary body and the representative trade union—are a privilege. At the turn of the 21st century, it is a privilege that we should look into.

LEADER OF THE HOUSE

The Leader of the House was asked—

Modernisation

Karen Buck: What plans he has to propose the removal of the term "stranger" from the Standing Orders.

Ann Coffey: What action he is taking on the recommendation of the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons to end the use of the term "stranger".

Peter Hain: I intend in due course to table for the consideration of the House a motion to amend the Standing Orders to remove the references to "strangers". I intend to discuss with you, Mr. Speaker, whether that change might also be reflected in the names used for parts of the Palace and in other usage in the House.

Karen Buck: When my constituents come to Parliament as my guests, they are treated like royalty and fed lavishly at my expense—at least, some of them are. However, when they make their own arrangements to attend Parliament, all too often they are left queueing in the rain and labelled as "strangers". Although House staff display exceptional courtesy and efficiency, my constituents are treated as the institutional equivalent of the Ebola virus. Is not it time that the House abolished the concept of "strangers"? Will my right hon. Friend assure me that he will make the speediest possible moves to bring this House into the 21st century?

Peter Hain: I agree with my hon. Friend, in every respect. The prospect of being treated like royalty makes me wish that I was one of her constituents. Interestingly, the "Oxford English Dictionary" states that the parliamentary use of the term "stranger" refers to
	"one who is not a member or an official of the House and is present at its debates only on suffrance".
	That is entirely the wrong message to give to our voters and citizens. This is their House of Commons and we are here at their permission. They are not strangers. They are citizens and voters who are entitled to be here and to be treated properly.

Ann Coffey: I welcome my right hon. Friend's reply in relation to the use of the word "stranger", but does he agree that other strange words are used in this place, such as the term "honourable Member"? Is there any support for a change that would allow MPs to be addressed by their names, without the use of that archaic and unmodernised term?

Peter Hain: That is a revolutionary suggestion, but we should take matters one at a time. Let us get "strangers" consigned to the history books. I understand that the issue of right hon. and hon. Members has been considered in the past by the Modernisation Committee and the House, but it was not taken forward. My hon. Friend is free to continue to campaign for change.

Eric Forth: How many complaints has the Leader of the House had from visitors to this House about use of the term "stranger"?

Peter Hain: In the evidence that the Modernisation Committee took, it was deeply resented by virtually everybody—especially younger people—who came to give evidence to us. It emerged as an issue in our inquiries. People queue up to enter the Palace sometimes in the rain, as my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) said, although that problem will be overcome by the new visitor reception facility. When they get in, they feel, in the words of one person who spoke to us, like aliens rather than citizens who are entitled to be here as of right. It is their Parliament as much as it is our Parliament. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to stay in mediaeval times, that is a matter for him: we are going forward into the modern era.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there is a vital difference between gesture politics and genuine change? Are we not in danger of mistaking the two? Perhaps it would be simpler to stop applying the word "stranger" to members of the general public—who are now corralled in unacceptable conditions in this place—and apply it to Members of Parliament who increasingly find the Chamber a place of great strangeness.

Peter Hain: In the sense that too many Members find it strange being in the Chamber because they spend too much time in their offices, I understand the point that my hon. Friend makes. However, I am sure that she will agree that the reforms recommended by the Modernisation Committee will be a huge advance in reconnecting Westminster with the voters.

Mark Lazarowicz: What steps he will take in response to the report by the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons on "Connecting Parliament with the Public".

Peter Hain: I intend to discuss with you, Mr. Speaker, with my colleagues on the House of Commons Commission, and with other parliamentary colleagues, how best to approach the Committee's recommendations.

Mark Lazarowicz: I urge my right hon. Friend to give enthusiastic backing to the implementation of the recommendations in the report in their entirety as soon as possible. He must know that the combined forces of bureaucratic inertia, backwoodsmen, backwoodswomen, and old and young fogeys could delay the changes for years and years. I suggest that he give Members an early chance to debate and vote on the proposals, so that they can be implemented before the next general election. Taking issues one at a time as he suggested in an earlier answer could result in the 35 recommendations in the report taking several decades to implement.

Peter Hain: I am with my hon. Friend on the need to move as quickly as I can, but many of the decisions are for other bodies in the House, including the House of Commons Commission and other Committees. However, his essential point was that we should no longer give the impression that we are a private club for Members of Parliament. The House of Commons should be open and inclusive, and connect as much as possible. The Committee has made a series of recommendations, including having staff on hand to welcome visitors and encourage them to take the opportunities available to them in Parliament, a new visitors' centre, sending a new voter guide to every 18-year-old, modernising our websites and using the education unit for outreach work, as the National Assembly for Wales has done far more effectively than we have so far. The report has far-reaching implications for connecting Parliament with the electorate in a modern way.

Paul Tyler: On our electors witnessing what we are doing here on their behalf, I endorse what the Leader of the House has just said. Given that the number of occasions that they may do so may decrease—for example, it may not be possible in future for them to observe the Prime Minister appearing before the Liaison Committee—will the Leader of the House pay particular attention to those elements of the package from the Modernisation Committee that improve access online? That can be introduced relatively quickly and cheaply and is already probably much more useful to hundreds of thousands of our electors than attempting to come here, which is more difficult.
	I also ask the Leader of the House to consider improving the press facilities in the House, which are also covered in the report. If and when there is a visitor centre, can we please get rid of the—

Mr. Speaker: Order. One supplementary is enough for the Leader of the House to reply to.

Peter Hain: I very much agree with the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) on his point that millions of people who may never have the chance physically to visit the Chamber could do so through the internet, through online consultation and a much better website. One of the criticisms made by the Modernisation Committee was of the existing parliamentary website. The Committee suggested that it needed upgrading in various respects. That would enable many more people to make a virtual tour of Parliament, which I know the hon. Gentleman strongly supports, thereby gaining a much greater understanding of our parliamentary democracy.
	On press facilities, if the hon. Gentleman is referring to a more co-ordinated media operation for Select Committees, Standing Committees and the other work of the House that goes unreported, we recommend that.

Broadcasting

Graham Allen: What discussions he has had with the BBC regarding its coverage of online pre-legislative scrutiny by the House.

Phil Woolas: My right hon. Friend has had no discussions with the BBC on that subject. However, I have had informal discussions with the BBC about widening access to parliamentary proceedings.

Graham Allen: I would like to welcome the fact that the Government have put to online legislative scrutiny almost every appropriate Bill that has come before the House, but unfortunately I cannot do so at present as it would be a little premature. I hope that my hon. Friend will enter serious discussions with the BBC, because its website obviously has an even greater attraction than our parliamentary website and would for the first time open up real law-making to the general public as well as to Members of Parliament.

Phil Woolas: I commend my hon. Friend's persistence in pursuing that point. I believe that he realises that we are sympathetic to his point of view; online consultation is opening the scrutiny of law   to a much wider public. The website www.tellparliament.net, which is managed for us by the Hansard Society, is becoming widely known. That is not contradictory, and would not exclude the BBC from taking such opportunities further, but I caution that such matters are also for Committees of the House as well as for my hon. Friend.

Oliver Heald: As the BBC receives public money and has a public service obligation, should not it provide active links from its news and current affairs output, and from BBC Online, to our online parliamentary forums? What do the hon. Gentleman and the Leader of the House plan to do to ensure that we make the most of online forums, given their success when they have been used?

Phil Woolas: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question. I agree that the opportunities that such technology opens for us to allow the public much greater access to scrutiny are to be welcomed. That is why we have made developments. As he knows, Select Committees and Standing Committees are available live on the webcast and the BBC follows those events. He will know through the PARBUL—Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit Ltd.—Committee that those things have been discussed, and I look forward to a situation in the none-too-distant future where such facilities will be widely available. However, I emphasise that the matter is not just for my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, but for the House as well.

Points of Order

Tam Dalyell: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker.
	This is a gentle and 90 per cent. genuine point of order. In the very courteous and helpful answer from the Advocate-General to Question 17, she said, in relation to the Lockerbie trial and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, that it was up to my ingenuity to find a way of raising the issue in the House and that on the whole it was a question for the Scottish Parliament. I put it to you, Mr. Speaker, that it is rather more than that. It is not a question of my ingenuity or lack of it, but of the rules of the House and the delicate grey area in such matters of the relationship between the House and the Scottish Parliament. May I ask you to ask the Clerks to think carefully about the issues raised, in the event of some very interesting and perhaps important conclusions from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission?

Mr. Speaker: I think that the Minister was really saying that the Father of the House always shows great ingenuity anyway. The best course of action is for the Father of the House to go to the Table Office and perhaps discuss this matter. He is quite right to suggest that, usually, his points of order are 90 per cent. genuine—it is the 10 per cent. that always worries me.

Anne McIntosh: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Would it be open to the Father of the House or any other right hon. or hon. Member to pursue this point by requesting an Adjournment debate to be answered by the Advocate-General? Would that be in order?

Mr. Speaker: It is in order to try, and then I can come to a reasoned decision.

Oliver Heald: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. During Advocate-General's questions, the Advocate-General admitted that it is almost impossible for her to answer any question that is put to her because of parliamentary convention. Would it therefore be possible for perhaps you, Mr. Speaker, but certainly the Government to consider what the purpose of that short Question Time is and how necessary it is?

Mr. Speaker: The question rota is matter for negotiation between the usual channels.

Tam Dalyell: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. How could I raise Lockerbie?

Mr. Speaker: If I needed advice on how to raise Lockerbie, I would go to the Father of the House.

Antisocial Behaviour

Wayne David: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about antisocial behaviour.
	Antisocial behaviour is, unfortunately, the single biggest concern of my constituents. Over the past 12 months, I have received numerous reports of unacceptable behaviour in different parts of my constituency. I shall give a few examples. In Ystrad Mynach, there have been complaints about young people drinking in the town centre and about rowdy and abusive behaviour. Recently, it was even reported that an elderly person's front window was smashed and that numerous gardens have been vandalised and garden sheds demolished in the area.
	In Senghennydd, a group of young men have been intimidating local shopkeepers and residents, and elderly people find it almost impossible to leave their homes on occasion. Recently, a lorry was even set on fire in the middle of the village. In Caerphilly, parts of the Lansbury Park estate are virtually no-go areas for the local residents. Unfortunately, there has been at least one very serious example of racial abuse. I am pleased that antisocial behaviour orders are at least being introduced, but nevertheless there is ongoing cause for concern in that area.
	In Nelson, residents of the Maes Mabon estate have been abused by youngsters from outside the area. Fires have been lit in the streets. Cars have been burned out. Mud and eggs have been thrown at houses. Youngsters have even ridden bicycles on the roofs of senior citizens' bungalows. In the village itself, drunken youths have occasionally blocked the main road. All those are examples of unacceptable behaviour. Of course, what I have cited is not peculiar to my constituency alone. Hon. Members tell me that similar problems are witnessed throughout the length and breadth of this country.
	It is wrong to exaggerate the scale of the problem. We are always talking about a small minority of people, particularly young people. It is true that young people simply congregating on street corners can be seen as a problem, and sometimes the perception is that more trouble takes place than actually does. We have also seen good examples of communities pulling together to tackle those problems. Indeed, there is clear evidence that the Government's policies are working and that police action is succeeding.
	One of the most successful measures that we have seen over recent years is the introduction of police community support officers, who are uniformed civilians employed by the police. They have been introduced gradually over the past couple of years. By the end of January 2004, we had some 3,219 CSOs in 38 police authorities, and that figure has now increased to 3,300. The number of CSOs engaged throughout the country varies. In West Yorkshire, for example, there are 206 CSOs. There are five each in Dyfed-Powys and Staffordshire. There are some 50 CSOs operating in my area of Gwent, and it is expected that some 4,000 CSOs will be in place by the end of this year.
	We were told about the role of community support officers in the Government White Paper "Policing a New Century: A Blueprint for Reform". It was said that they would empower local communities and individuals so that the police would be able to carry out their functions effectively. We were told that CSOs would provide
	"a visible presence in the community with powers sufficient to deal with anti-social behaviour and minor disorder."
	From my experience, there can be no doubt that CSOs have a good visible presence. Mr. Neville Davies is a CSO in Caerphilly, and he frequently pops into my constituency office for a chat about how things are going in the area. I recently spoke to a senior citizens' group in the centre of Caerphilly and was reassured to note that all its members knew Neville Davies, saw him frequently and were aware of the good work that he was doing. He relates well to young people, too, and has been instrumental in furthering several antisocial behaviour orders.
	Similar feedback has come from other parts of the United Kingdom. Only today, a press release issued by the chief constable of Essex police said:
	"The evidence so far suggests we have an effective team of appropriately-trained, well motivated, fully-integrated police community support officers who have made a valuable contribution to the provision of policing within the county  . . . They have been warmly welcomed, not only by the communities they serve, but by police officers and police staff colleagues."
	That is all extremely encouraging, but the work of CSOs in Essex and elsewhere could be even more effective if they had more powers.
	The powers of community support officers are set out in the Police Reform Act 2002 and subsequent legislation, and we could extend their powers in certain areas. For example, I believe that CSOs should have the power to confiscate alcohol not only when cans are open, but when they are closed. They should be able to confiscate not only from young people, but from misbehaving adults. Fixed penalty notices have been introduced successfully in several pilot areas, so CSOs in all parts of the country should be able to perform the essential function of issuing them.
	It is important to consider carefully whether CSOs should have the power of detention. In six trial areas, including Gwent, CSOs have the authority to detain individuals for up to 30 minutes, until such time as a police officer arrives on the scene or an individual agrees to be accompanied to the police station. That important pilot initiative should be extended to all police authorities. I also suggest that CSOs should have the power of arrest in specific clearly defined circumstances relating to antisocial behaviour. If the Government go down that road, as I hope they will, it is clear that CSOs will require more training. They receive only three weeks' training at the moment, so that period would have to be extended significantly. CSOs require far more resources if they are to do their jobs effectively, especially if their powers are to be increased.
	At present, there is no financial commitment for CSOs beyond 2006. I think that there should be. It would be wrong if, in 2006, police forces across the country had to choose whether police resources should be allocated to the continued employment of CSOs. There should be sufficient resources for police and for CSOs in all parts of the country, which is the first proposal in my Bill. The second proposal is that CSOs' powers should be extended, particularly regarding the confiscation of alcohol, which is the cause of much antisocial behaviour. Thirdly, the Bill provides for CSOs to be given the power of arrest in clearly defined circumstances, initially in pilot areas.
	Antisocial behaviour is a scourge of today's society, and there is no easy to solution to the problem. We need an array of complementary policies, but CSOs should play a permanent part in our policing, and will be more effective if they are given reasonable powers, enabling them to make an even bigger contribution to the ending of antisocial behaviour.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Wayne David, Mark Tami, Siobhain McDonagh, Mr. Tony Lloyd, David Wright, Mr. Jon Owen Jones, Mr. Peter Kilfoyle, Mr. Parmjit Dhanda, Ian Lucas, Diana Organ, Mrs. Jackie Lawrence and Chris Ruane.

Antisocial Behaviour

Mr. Wayne David accordingly presented a Bill to make provision about antisocial behaviour: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 15 October, and to be printed [Bill 128].

London Schools

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Stephen Twigg.]

Stephen Twigg: I am delighted to have the opportunity to open a debate on London schools and set out the work of the London challenge. London's future will depend to a large part on the success of its education system. Our task is to make London the world's leading learning and creative capital city, striving for excellence for all, and using all the world-class resources in the city to achieve that objective. There is a clear moral imperative to ensure equality of opportunity for all London students; to provide a chance for each one to reach their potential; and to extend their horizons through education. In a London context, we must demonstrate that the long-standing link between social and economic deprivation and poor educational performance can be broken once and for all.
	When the Prime Minister launched the London challenge strategy a year ago, he talked about an education system in London that is
	"not merely good, but world class."
	We are starting from a strong base in London, underpinned by the enthusiasm and commitment of everyone involved in our schools. The London challenge works on two broad levels. First, it seeks to take up issues that are common to schools across the capital that affect staff, pupils and parents throughout greater London. Secondly, it seeks to recognise that individual schools in particular localities face challenging circumstances, so need extra support, encouragement and challenge.
	London is unique because it faces the challenges that face other metropolitan areas as well as those that face other parts of the high-cost south-east of England. Two hundred of the 1,000 most deprived wards in the country are here in London, concentrated in the east of the city, but with pockets of significant deprivation across the capital. In inner London, free school meal eligibility is 43 per cent., compared with 17 per cent. nation wide in England. In London, great extremes of wealth and deprivation exist side by side. London's population is polarised: disproportionately many with incomes in the top 20 per cent. of national incomes, disproportionately many with incomes in the bottom 20 per cent., and relatively few in the middle, where most of our key workers would typically be.
	That places great pressure on all our key public services, including education, in the form of problems recruiting and retaining essential workers.Annual teacher turnover in London is around 15 per cent., compared with an England average of 11 per cent. Just when many teachers are looking to move into middle leadership positions such as heads of year and heads of department in schools, the cost of family homes so often drives them out of London or out of teaching.
	London replicates many of the divides of other parts of the country in terms of social background, ethnicity and gender, but the greater diversity of the capital city makes that especially crucial in London. Thirty-eight per cent. of the school population in London has English as an additional language, compared with 8 per cent. in England as a whole. London has not one, but 33 local education authorities, some of them very small, with high pupil mobility across LEA boundaries.
	It is this unique combination of challenges that made the case for focusing attention and resources here in London, which is why the London challenge was launched a year ago. In many respects, London's schools are as good as or better than schools in the rest of the country. In recent years London's schools have improved one and a half times faster than the national average at GCSE, with just over 50 per cent. of students achieving five or more A* to C grades in London secondary schools. If we compare London schools with schools in the rest of the country in the free school meal band, London schools do better than schools in other parts of the country in every single free school meal band.
	In an international context, educational achievement in this country is high, but not in every section of the community. The groups that are left behind are typically those from some of the most deprived backgrounds, especially black Caribbean and white working-class boys. As London is home to such a diverse population, the task is pressing for London schools. The data show unequivocally the great task that we face.
	On average, as I said, about half of London pupils get five A* to C grades at GCSE, but for those on free school meals, that figure falls to 30 per cent., and for those from a black Caribbean background it falls to one in three. These effects are cumulative. For a pupil who is poor, black and a boy, the chance of getting five A* to C grades at GCSE is 15 per cent. For a pupil who is wealthy, Chinese and a girl, it is more than 80 per cent. The diversity of London is critical if we are to meet the challenge set out in the strategy.
	In recent years we have seen significant improvements in attendance at London schools. The average attendance figures for London schools are now better than the average attendance figures for schools elsewhere in the country, but we know that behaviour remains a massive factor for London schools in the context of the local community, impacting directly on the school. We know the effect that that has on the reputation of the school and its ability to recruit and retain good quality staff, and the impact on children and young people. That is why 20 London authorities are part of the behaviour improvement programme, covering 380 schools across our capital city.
	School leadership in London is better now than the national average. According to Ofsted, the percentage of inner London secondary schools rated good or excellent for leadership and management is 84 per cent., compared with 79 per cent. nationally, yet we also know that we have a shortage of middle leaders, and the age profile of heads means that we will lose a significant number of head teachers. We need to replenish the pool from which we draw head teachers.
	A striking feature of London is the perceptions of parents and the wider public. Perception of education in London lags behind the reality. We conducted a survey of parents. Parents in London are more satisfied with their child's school than the national average figure: 51 per cent. of parents of secondary-age pupils in London are very satisfied with their own child's school, compared with 39 per cent. nationally.

Eric Forth: I am very interested in this part of the Minister's remarks, as that finding runs counter to the general perception. Does he have any figures for the percentage of pupils in London who are sent by their parents to independent sector schools, as opposed to state schools? Anecdotally, one is always led to believe that parents in London are so much more dissatisfied with the state sector that they tend disproportionately to send their children to the independent sector.

Stephen Twigg: I do have figures. The figures are collected according to the location of the school, rather than the location of the family home—that is a note of caution—but the indications are that the anecdotal evidence that the right hon. Gentleman mentions is correct. The percentage of pupils attending private schools in London is higher than the national average. It may be as much as twice the national average figure.

Karen Buck: May I advise my hon. Friend that in the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington, where my constituency is situated, around 50 per cent. of all children are educated in the independent sector? As both of those authorities are Conservative-controlled, it would be unwise to read too much into that figure in terms of satisfaction with the Government's management of the education system.

Stephen Twigg: I thank my hon. Friend for that. I will come on to some of the broader figures, but the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) raises a legitimate point. [Interruption.] I am asked what the figures are. The national figure is about 7 per cent. The London figure is 13 or 14 per cent. I reiterate my word of caution: that is based on where the school is, rather than where the home is. If the figure were based on the location of the home, it might be a little lower. Part of the challenge that we face is to restore confidence in the system as a whole.
	I cited the figure for parents' satisfaction with their own child's school. If we move on and ask people's views of schools in their borough, in the local area, the picture is quite different. Nationally, 71 per cent. are satisfied. In London the figure is much lower: 53 per cent. That suggests that parents think their own school, generally speaking, is good, but that the schools in their borough are not so good and that schools in London as a whole are often a lot worse. That is a significant part of the challenge that we face.

Geraint Davies: Does my hon. Friend accept that school funding should reflect the difficulty of teaching those particular pupils? In a borough such as Croydon, about a third of the pupils are educated outside the borough, some in private schools and some in grammar schools in Bromley and Sutton, and a third of the pupils come in from Lambeth, Southwark and so on. The profile of funding reflects the profile of the pupils being taught in the borough, rather than the profile of those who live there, which should be reflected in the funding formula.

Stephen Twigg: I tread with caution into the area of funding, particularly in a borough such as my hon. Friend's, which has had a number of difficulties over the past 12 to 18 months. We have sought to ensure that the funding system treats identical pupils in different parts of the country identically. Per pupil funding generally in London is, rightly, considerably higher than in other parts of the country.
	We now have in London more full-time teachers than we have had for about 20 years. There has been a rise in full-time teacher numbers of almost 5,000 since 1997, and a rise in the number of support staff from 19,000 to 32,000 over the same period. The number of teacher vacancies has fallen, but it is still significantly higher than the national figure.
	The average per pupil funding in London has increased by more than £1,000 in real terms since 1997, and capital funding has increased considerably, from £80 million in 1997 to about £500 million in the last financial year. Real progress has been made—progress that matters to London's young people and the chances that they will have. The progress is accelerating, but we need to build on it.

Simon Hughes: I do not want to be unfairly critical, but will the Minister confirm that the number of qualified teachers in primary schools has recently decreased, and that the student-teacher ratio has worsened in the past few years? Although the general movement may be in the right direction, two worrying elements remain, namely the pupil-teacher ratio and the smaller number of qualified teachers in our primary schools.

Stephen Twigg: The hon. Gentleman raises a number of issues. The latest figures show an overall national increase in the number of teachers in schools, but the number of teachers in primary schools has fallen. The main explanation is a significant fall in rolls—the number of children in primary schools has fallen. The picture on ratios is mixed: the average class size for key stage 1 in infant schools has decreased, but the average class size for key stage 2 is more stable. If we take into account other adults who work in our schools, however, the adult staff to pupil ratio is better than ever. The picture is mixed, and I do not underestimate the challenge in recruiting and retaining the best quality staff.
	Some schools in London have achieved great success, and I shall mention one in particular. The Sir John Cass Foundation and Redcoat Church of England school in Stepney specialises in languages, and it serves a deprived community, where the majority of children—56 per cent.—are eligible for free school meals, and where three quarters of the children, 78 per cent., speak English as an additional language. Seven years ago, 8 per cent. of children at that school achieved five GCSEs at grades between A* and C; the latest figure is almost 80 per cent, which is a remarkable testament to what can be done with able leadership and effective teaching and learning in a school that serves a deprived community. That is one example, and I could cite a number of others, although there is no cause for complacency.
	The London challenge is about recognising that the issues are serious. We have identified two areas of London—the north London boroughs of Hackney, Haringey and Islington, and the south London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark—where parental dissatisfaction is especially high when pupils transfer from primary schools to secondary schools, and we are working with schools and local authorities to transform the schools in those areas. We have published joint plans with schools and local authorities on investment, new schools, academies, improved sixth-form provision, the use of specialist schools and other diversity programmes and the creation of a more collegiate approach to improving schools.
	Good signs are already emerging from those boroughs. Last year, for example, Hackney's GCSE results were up by 8.1 per cent., which was among the best performances in the country, and the other boroughs have also experienced significant improvements that have exceeded the national averages.

Eric Forth: I do not want to interrupt the Minister's self-congratulatory flow too much, but will he give us his thoughts on the so-called Greenwich judgment? In boroughs such as Bromley, which is rightly proud of the excellence of its schools, parents complain bitterly about the influx of pupils from neighbouring boroughs, who, as the parents see it, displace Bromley children from our excellent schools. What is the Government's view on the Greenwich judgment?

Stephen Twigg: I do not want to be self-congratulatory or to take any great credit for the remarkable achievements of schools, pupils and teachers in the authorities about which I am talking. The Greenwich judgment occurred just before the right hon. Gentleman became an Education Minister, and he did not take the opportunity to overturn it. It creates winners and losers, and, like the right hon. Gentleman, I represent an outer-London constituency, where I meet both parents whose children lose out because of the Greenwich judgment and parents whose children benefit from it.
	It makes a lot of sense to encourage effective and successful neighbourhood schools that parents want to opt for, and borough boundaries in London are often irrelevant to that process. The policy that the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) launched today would allow schools to change their catchment areas, which means that pupils who live near a school would lose their advantage over pupils who live much further away.
	The Greenwich judgment makes a lot of sense, because it enables young people to go to their nearest school. It recognises that the existence of 33 LEAs in London means that a child's local school will not necessarily be in the same borough as that in which they are resident, and it plays a positive part in our strategy to improve London's schools.
	I shall proceed with the self-congratulation, or rather the congratulation of the achievements in London, although I recognise that we still have a long way to go. We have identified the schools that face the biggest challenges, which we have described as the "keys to success". The measure of success London-wide will be whether the most challenged schools with the poorest results can achieve performance levels exceeding those achieved by themselves in the past or by schools in similar circumstances. The early indications suggest that many of those schools are making progress, and we are working closely with them to ensure that that progress is built upon.
	Some pan-London issues apply to north, south, east and west London and to inner and outer London, and ensuring that London's schools employ the best teachers is one such issue. The high cost of housing in London is one of the biggest challenges, and being able to afford a home is a crucial issue in keeping teachers in London, which is why we have launched a major new housing offer for teachers. The offer is based on the knowledge that many teachers, who have the potential to be future leaders in London's schools, leave London as they enter leadership positions because they cannot afford family homes. We are offering 1,000 of those teachers the chance to take an interest-free loan of up to £100,000 to allow them to afford a family home.
	The second part of our package helps teachers who come to London early in their careers, but who leave after a short time because of the high cost of housing. Such teachers will be eligible for interest-free loans of up to £50,000, and they will not repay such loans until and unless they leave London or leave teaching in London. The programme has just begun—the early take-up is high—and will last for at least two years. It will play a critical role in recruiting and retaining the highest quality teachers in London.

Sydney Chapman: I applaud the Minister on the initiatives that he describes, especially given the soaring cost of housing in our capital city. Will he comment on an equally important matter, namely the relationship between London weighting and the high cost of living in London? The approach to inner-London and outer-London weighting must be more sophisticated, because inner-London weighting is resulting in a shortage of applications in some outer-London boroughs.

Stephen Twigg: My constituency borders the hon. Gentleman's constituency, so I am familiar with the issue, which has been raised with me by schools in both his constituency and mine. We must continue to address pay and allowances for teachers and other staff, because although outer-London weighting has improved in recent years, the improvement in inner-London weighting has been more significant. The School Teachers Review Body says that it wants to keep the matter under review, and that it wants to address the concern in some outer-London boroughs that staff are being lost to nearby boroughs that pay inner-London weighting. I imagine that that issue will arise again in the debate, and, if I have the opportunity to do so, I may say more in my closing remarks.

Andrew Love: My hon. Friend knows the impact that the four rigid pay bands have on schools in my constituency and, indeed, in his constituency. He mentioned the School Teachers Review Body, which has made some recommendations that are currently being consulted on. Those recommendations would introduce greater flexibility in allowing schools to respond to teacher shortages. What is the Government view on those recommendations, and will they take them up when the School Teachers Review Body reports in September?

Stephen Twigg: I thank my hon. Friend for making that point, which it would be most sensible for me to take up in my closing remarks. At this stage, I want to emphasise that it is important to ensure stability of funding in our schools. That has been a priority for the Department over the past year following the difficulties of 12 months ago. For the medium and longer term, we need to consider how schools can be in a position to recruit and retain the best possible teachers and other staff.
	I am conscious of the time and will draw my remarks towards a close. In doing so, I want to refer to some of the programmes that are making a real difference in London. I particularly commend Teach First, which is not a DFES programme, although we partly funded it. That is a business-led programme that recruits some of the best graduates from universities across the country. It has cross-party support and support from all the head teacher associations and teacher unions. It seeks out graduates who would not normally go into teaching. They commit themselves to at least two years teaching in London, usually in the most challenging schools, and acquire qualified teacher status at the end of year one. Last September, the first cohort of Teach First graduates—179 of them—started in London schools, and the aim is to recruit 230 for September this year, prioritising challenging schools. That is the kind of exciting and innovative programme that I am pleased to support for the schools of London and that I believe to be very much in the spirit of the London challenge.
	Finally, I want to focus on the need to ensure that we have a range of secondary schools in London that meet the real needs of the children and young people of our capital city. London now has 196 specialist schools—nearly half of its secondary schools—with a further 50 applying in the current round, the outcome of which is due to be announced later this week.

Joan Ruddock: Does my hon. Friend recognise the huge success of Deptford Green school in my constituency? When I first became an MP, parents begged me to get their child out of Deptford Green school; today, they beg me to get their child into it. That is a measure of its success. The school has done groundbreaking work on citizenship, and we very much hope for a favourable decision on its specialist school application, which will be largely centred on citizenship.

Stephen Twigg: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I am not in a position to anticipate announcements scheduled for later in the week. As she knows, however, I have visited Deptford Green school, which is hugely impressive and has done groundbreaking work on citizenship. It was very much the influence of that school and one or two others that led to our creation of the new specialism of humanities including citizenship. I have every confidence that Deptford Green is a school that will continue to go from strength to strength.
	Another school that has done very well, partly as a consequence of specialism, is Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school in Islington. Just five years ago, 23 per cent. of its students achieved five A* to C grades at GCSE; last summer, that figure topped 50 per cent. That is a school in the heart of north London. The majority of its students are eligible for free school meals, and they are from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds; two thirds have English as an additional language.
	The academies programme is critical to our chances of success in London. We are working with sponsors and local education authorities to broker academy projects across London. Six academies are already open, a further four will open in September, and we aim to have 30 by 2008. The academies have huge value in three respects: first, they break the link between deprivation and underachievement for students and families in the most challenging schools; secondly, they raise standards for the whole area by working with local schools and local government to share resources, facilities and professional development opportunities for teachers; and thirdly, they use the levers of innovation and diversity to bring new ways of working driven by the partnership of professional teachers and sponsors for the benefit of the whole school population.
	We have begun to look across London to establish the demand for new schools and places. Our projections suggest that some 20 additional secondary schools will be needed over the next four years. We will achieve that through a mixture of traditional routes, academies, and the "Building Schools for the Future" programme. More widely, "Building Schools for the Future" will lead to the rebuilding or refurbishment of the country's entire secondary school estate over the next 10 to 15 years, and I expect many of the most challenging and deprived parts of London to be involved in the early part of that programme.
	The improvements that we need to make cannot simply be left to the schools themselves. London has all sorts of other resources that we can tap into, including cultural, sporting, and business and employer resources. Last year, we launched the business challenge to offer every secondary school the opportunity to forge a high-quality partnership with leading London businesses. More than 100 businesses are currently involved in working with and getting behind the efforts of schools in the capital city. For many areas, notably Tower Hamlets, forging those links has already made a difference, and I am confident that it has the potential to make much more of a difference in the future.
	There is a genuine sense of optimism. I recognise that there is an enormous amount to do if we are to recruit and retain the highest quality teachers. I also recognise that some schools that are key to success need to improve, and that we must work with them to ensure that they do. I do not underestimate the challenges that we face, but things are moving in the right direction. I am impressed by the broad support across London for the work of the London challenge. I am grateful to Tim Brighouse, who acts as our chief adviser, and to the London challenge team in the Department for Education and Skills. I invite the House's support for this important work, because that will show that Members on both sides of the House want to ensure that every London child has the chance of a world-class education.

Angela Watkinson: Having heard the Minister's comments, I am surprised at how much consensus there will be in most, if not all, areas. I suspect, however, that we may have sourced our statistics differently.
	In terms of local environment and socio-economic profile, there are widely differing circumstances in the 2,300 maintained schools that serve 1 million pupils in the 33 London boroughs, which range from leafy suburbs in outer London to densely populated inner London. London has the highest levels of child poverty in the country, and its schools have an unequalled ethnic diversity, with 275 languages spoken. The map of London is like a patchwork quilt of affluence and poverty, which are never far away from one another. Not surprisingly, the schools in those areas produce widely differing results, and widely differing challenges face London schools to ensure that each one is the best that it can possibly be. Those challenges do not respond well to centrally imposed policies.
	It is important to start by acknowledging the many highly successful schools in London. We should then look closely at why they are so successful and why others are failing their pupils. We need to examine best practice and the factors that lead to success in a school, and to use that information to raise the standard of failing or less successful schools to the same high standard. Levelling must always be up, not down. There is no merit in equality of achievement and opportunity if it is based on the lowest common denominator. The sky should be the limit for the educational aspirations of our school children. The different aptitudes, needs and interests of each individual child should be developed so that they are able to reach their full potential.
	The picture across London schools is very patchy. Only one of the nine local authorities in London to be rated as excellent on education by the Audit Commission is Labour controlled, as is one of the lowest rated for comprehensive performance assessment. After seven years of "education, education, education", the performance of some of the capital's schools represents one of the Government's greatest failures. Some have the lowest results in the country.
	One in three of London's 14-year-olds cannot read, write or count properly. That is a shocking statistic. Only half the pupils in London's schools pass five or more GCSEs by the age of 16. That means that the other half does not. What of their future career prospects? They must either go on to a further education college if they have the motivation and parental support to catch up on what they did not achieve at school or try to find a job that requires no entry qualifications.
	To get secondary education right, we must start at the beginning and get early-years education right. Early-years education plays an essential foundation role in developing children's interpersonal skills in preparation for primary school. Those skills bring long-term benefits to pre-school children that are far greater than any early formal learning. If children arrive in their reception class reasonably self-confident, co-operative, already knowing how to communicate, play, give and take, share and simply get on with other children, their teachers have an ideal base on which to start their formal education. So often, teachers have to teach those essential basic life skills as well as the standard curriculum.
	Inner London in particular has many children for whom English is a second language. Children in the same class often have a range of different first languages. My statistic for that was 42 per cent. and the Minister's was 38 per cent., so can we agree that 40 per cent. of children in inner London speak English as a second language compared with a national average of only 8 per cent.? Teaching those children a good command of English as early as possible to enable them to live and learn successfully alongside their peers is essential if they are to realise their full potential.
	Seventy per cent. of all African-Caribbean pupils in the country attend London schools. They are concentrated in the boroughs of Hackney, Haringey, Lambeth, Southwark and Islington. They enter compulsory schooling as one of the highest achieving groups but, by the age of 11, their achievement begins to drop and when they leave at 16, they form the group least likely to have attained five high grade GCSEs. The "Aiming High" pilot project is working on the problem in 18 schools in London. Smaller projects, such as that in Winchmore school in Enfield, ease the transition from primary to secondary school. Developing interpersonal skills is an important part of those schemes. School life would be so much easier for those pupils, as well as their peers and teachers, if they acquired such essential life skills in their early years.
	Recent examination results show that African, African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students perform noticeably less well than Chinese and Indian students. That suggests that more individually tailored solutions might work better to raise achievement levels among black students, who also have the highest exclusion and truancy rates. Various other mentoring schemes have been introduced to tackle disaffection, substance abuse, social exclusion, truancy and discipline and, essentially, to involve parents so that one set of standards applies at home and at school.
	Mentoring is usually for a defined period and there appears to be a dearth of evaluation of the effectiveness of the schemes in the short and long term and of the accountability of the mentors. However, the Dalston youth project in the London borough of Hackney and the Islington-based "Chance" were found to have achieved some success. Early anecdotal evidence suggests that other projects have had a measure of success in broadening horizons, raising achievement and self-esteem. However, there is a danger that it will be difficult to collate the results of so many concurrent schemes.
	It is essential that the 10 new schools—seven of them city academies—that are being built in the five boroughs with the worst secondary schools have the freedom of management to succeed. In Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth and Southwark, new purpose-built schools alone will not lead to the improvements in standards that everyone wants for the pupils in those boroughs.
	Choosing a school is an emotive task for parents. It is important to them that they get a place at the school of their choice because their child's future is at stake. Apart from the acknowledged reputation of the school, one of the biggest influences on that choice is the appearance and behaviour of the pupils outside school. Pupils are a school's best or worst advert as they wait for buses or use local shops when they travel to and from school. Responsible parents will not want to send their children to a school whose pupils look scruffy and are noisy and badly behaved in public. Enforceable home-to-school contracts will be beneficial in that regard.
	The Government intend to introduce a joint admissions register in 2005 for 41 local education authorities in London and the surrounding areas. They say that that will "simplify and reduce confusion" in the allocation of secondary school places. Well, it might, but for whose benefit? The priority for a schools' admission system should be ensuring that as many parents as possible can send their children to the school of their choice, not making it simple to administer. Far from reducing parents' anxiety, the proposal has increased it.
	Are all parents to be punished because some held multiple offers in the past? Parents will be able to express six prioritised choices, but what about those who are offered a place at school No. 6—the school that everyone is trying desperately to avoid; the one with the undisciplined children who could be a bad influence on theirs? The new system might be easy and convenient to administer, but will it leave parents with one take-it-or-leave-it offer from a command-and-control, nanny-knows-best state? That is the opposite of parental choice. I predict that many parents will not approve of the place that they are allocated and that admissions appeal panels will burn the midnight oil to resolve the muddle.

Simon Hughes: We all appreciate that the hon. Lady is considering a hugely important and controversial issue. However, does she accept that it must be fairer to have one system that everybody uses—such as that for university admissions—rather than different systems, whereby those who know more and are quicker off the mark can do better for their children?

Angela Watkinson: I do not believe that we shall ever have a system that is scrupulously fair to everybody. Life is simply not like that. The old system would have worked well had not some parents held multiple offers. We know that some parents held three and even four offers of secondary school places and that that made it difficult for other parents who were waiting for a place to be allocated. However, I should like more rather than less parental choice, and not merely one place being offered to everybody. On the rule of averages, that place will not be in the school that most parents have requested.

Geraint Davies: Does the hon. Lady accept that the problem with the old system was that many people held many choices for a long time so that many others had no choice? The point of the co-ordinated approach is that those with many choices must take one so that the other places become available to other people. It will therefore lead to more, not fewer choices.

Angela Watkinson: The new system will mean that parents will be offered only one school and it may not be the one that they want. Parents will be happy if they get their first or even second choice, but if they get a school that is lower down the list of their six nominated schools, they will be unhappy.

Andrew Love: The Greenwich judgment has stood the test of time under Conservative Governments and this Government. What is the hon. Lady's attitude to it?

Angela Watkinson: I should like schools to take complete control of their admissions so that they decide whom to admit. Popular schools will naturally be over-subscribed and they have to find some method of deciding which children to admit. Selection should be undertaken by the schools, not centrally by providing that parents have to nominate six schools and simply take pot luck. Most people want to send their children to local schools if they are good. They apply elsewhere only when they deem their local school to be unsatisfactory.
	One good example of best practice is the Robert Clack school in Barking and Dagenham. This secondary school had a fairly undistinguished past but, with a committed and inspiring head teacher, has raised its standards to the extent that it has just received eight one ratings in its recent Ofsted report. When the inspectors asked the teachers what the school's failing group was, they were surprised to hear that there was not one. So positive is the attitude in that school that it simply would not be acceptable to allow any group to fail. Had there been such a group, however, its problems would have been tackled and the pupils involved would have been helped to improve. Improvements such as these do not come without a huge amount of sustained effort on the part of the head teacher to establish an ethos of high expectations, achievement, good manners and discipline, to which everyone in the school subscribes and which has the backing of the parents. That is the recipe for such success.
	Recently, a group of children from the Clore Tikva primary school in Ilford came to visit the House of Commons, and I went down to meet them at what should have been the end of their tour. The tour guide told me that it was the longest tour that he had ever done, and they were only just beginning. The children were asking so many questions that they had not even reached the Chamber. This was another example of a successful school. The children were interested, inquisitive, assertive, polite and well-behaved. The reasons do not require much analysis. That, too, was a school with a dynamic head teacher, high expectations, involved parents and a shared ethos—that same recipe for success.
	Pivotal to the success of all schools is the leadership of an especially talented head teacher who can inspire teaching staff, governors, pupils and parents alike to be proud of their school and to aim high. To succeed, however, head teachers must also be given the freedom to set standards of discipline and behaviour in legally enforceable contracts. They must have the right to exclude disruptive pupils who compromise the education of other pupils and breach the bounds of tolerable working conditions for teachers, and their authority should not be undermined by well-meaning appeals panels who overrule their exclusion decisions and force schools to readmit.
	I am sure that many hon. Members have sat on exclusion appeals panels, and will understand that exclusion is used as an absolute last resort after all other available disciplinary measures have been tried, often on many occasions, and failed. Head teachers need to be freed from the stultifying, centralised top-down control of Whitehall, and from the plethora of inspections, performance targets, testing, and standardised teaching that currently sap energy and morale. They should also be free to allocate their budgets to suit the particular circumstances of their school as distinct from other London schools.
	Last year's funding crisis was caused by the extra costs of inflation, the teachers' pay award, national insurance and pension contributions, and the additional administrative duties taken over by classroom assistants. Many London schools faced deficits of up to £250,000 and, of the 3,400 posts lost in English comprehensives, many were in London. Many London schools also spend more on staff than the assumed rate of 60 per cent. on teachers' salaries and 19 per cent. on support staff. Westminster schools' spending, for example, averages 84 to 85 per cent. of their budgets, with eight primaries spending more than 90 per cent.; one, Soho Parish school, spent 110 per cent. last year.
	The difficulties of recruitment in the capital have had to be met by offering enhanced salaries, which has had a serious impact on schools budgets. The extended schools scheme—whereby schools open earlier in the morning and provide breakfast and, at the end of the day, homework facilities, among many other things—can be provided only at a higher staffing cost. In some areas of London, there are pockets of falling rolls. Future funding for the pupil-related part of the budgets in those schools will suffer from the decline in the local population, and they will find it increasingly difficult to maintain staffing levels and all these additional services, however popular and successful they may be. Indeed, breakfast at school is growing in popularity, and pupils from homes where breakfast is freely available now prefer to have it at school with their friends. It is becoming a social gathering.
	Teacher vacancies across London have soared from 751 in 1997 to 1,020 in 2003, with some authorities, such as Bexley, experiencing a tenfold increase. The outer-London LEAs are feeling the effects of recruitment and retention problems badly. Head teachers from Havering have had to travel the world in search of teachers after repeated unsuccessful advertising, and this is also the case in other outer-London LEAs. Newly qualified teachers often accept posts in an outer-London school, only to find that they are unable to find affordable accommodation. Just a few miles down the road, however, the inner-London allowance is payable and accommodation is cheaper, and those teachers often have to change their plans and accept a job there instead. This is inner London's gain, of course.
	There are other pressures on newly qualified teachers' working conditions if standards of discipline and behaviour in a school have broken down. It takes a very resilient NQT to withstand constant challenges to their authority, refusals to conform, or even assaults by disaffected pupils, and many of them change careers and are lost to the teaching profession. Add to this the incessant record keeping and form filling that has escalated beyond all reasonable bounds in the last seven years, and the future does not bode well for teachers. They must be allowed to concentrate on teaching their pupils, rather than writing about them, in safe and acceptable conditions. Even allowances for additional responsibility have little appeal if they lift a teacher's salary into the 40 per cent. tax bracket. After deductions, even the one-off reward of £1,000 for gaining chartered London teacher status will not make a very big impression on the net amount on a teacher's salary slip.
	For schools to be able to enforce their disciplinary rules, all London LEAs need to have enough pupil referral units, located separately, to which excluded and disruptive pupils may be transferred and in which they can be taught, full-time, to behave in an acceptable way and to learn, with the aim of returning to mainstream schooling. The inner-London LEAs in which the problems are most pronounced need extensive PRU provision and exceptionally talented teachers to bring about the necessary changes to the behaviour of these pupils. But removing them to a different setting will enable those schools to raise the achievement levels of the rest of their pupils, who will benefit and thereby improve the reputation of the schools themselves and help to reverse their decline.
	Truancy in London is above the national average for both the primary and secondary sectors, and it is highest in inner London at 1.11 per cent. and 1.73 per cent. respectively. That might sound insignificant until it is measured against the total of 1 million children being educated in London. Quite apart from the missed education of each individual child involved, the dangers to children wandering about unsupervised in London are boundless, as is the temptation of falling into the company of drug users and criminals. Chronic truants are obvious candidates to be helped back to regular school attendance through a PRU, and schools must have an enforceable home-to-school contract with parents, to enable them to deal effectively with truanting children.

Geraint Davies: Does the hon. Lady accept that it is this Government who have required all excluded pupils to have a full five days' education a week through a pupil referral unit? Under the previous Conservative Administration, such pupils were taught for only one day a week, and spent the other four days wandering around stealing people's mobile phones, getting into all sorts of trouble and missing out on their education, which would lead to a life of criminality.

Angela Watkinson: I wholeheartedly support full-time education for excluded pupils; they almost need it more than the others.
	Like most hon. Members, I spend much of my time visiting the schools in my constituency. That is one of the most enjoyable parts of being an MP, and I am hugely encouraged about the future when I make those visits. The head teachers in my schools are providing dynamic, effective leadership that inspires and motivates teachers, governors and pupils alike. They are entitled to take much of the credit, but even in those advantageous circumstances, a school cannot achieve its aims without the essential ingredient of parental support and involvement.
	The presence of parents in a school, helping in a variety of ways in addition to the parent-teacher association, and their involvement at home, ensuring that homework is completed on time and simply taking an interest in what has happened during the school day, give children a sense of security that enables them to make the very best of the opportunities that their school is offering. Of course, we all know that some children do not have such benefits, and parents whose personal experience of school was not positive are the least likely to be able to help their own children or to seek contact with their children's school. In schools with a large percentage of pupils who do not enjoy that support and encouragement, enabling those children to fulfil their potential is an additional challenge in terms of pastoral care.
	I want to pay tribute to the splendid special schools in London, where pastoral care is especially important. I have three excellent special schools in my constituency, one of which I visited last night, to meet a group of parents of autistic children. The word "inclusion" strikes fear into the hearts of such parents, who rarely, if ever, enjoy an uninterrupted night's sleep, and for whom everyday activities such as having visitors to their home or going shopping are impossible. For such parents, and many others, special schools are an essential lifeline, and inclusion would be impossible. The inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream school needs to be very selective, and is only for those who can cope and for whom it would be a positive experience. Separate provision for many special needs children will always be necessary, and total inclusion would be damaging to them and to the interests of pupils and staff in the receiving mainstream school. I seek the Minister's assurance as to the secure future of London's special schools.
	The test of a successful school has less to do with league tables and more to do with the difference between what goes in at one end and what comes out the other. The measure of real success is how much progress those individual children have made during their time in the school and under what circumstances. Nationally, of the 29 LEAs scoring 100 points or more with value added results, 22 were London boroughs, 12 of them in inner London. The head teachers of those schools have best practice to share with weaker schools. They know what works and what does not through practical experience. They must be given control over policies, budget, staffing and how their schools are run.
	We have seen a plethora of initiatives in recent times, including the London leadership strategy, London business challenge, "Aiming High", the London Development Agency's education commission, "Presentation", Race on the Agenda—ROTA—excellence in cities, the youth inclusion programme, the national mentoring network, peer mentoring, "Chance", "Talented and Gifted", and the active community unit. But despite all this spending and frenetic activity, teacher vacancies have soared, one in three of London's 14-year-olds and one in four of London's 11-year-olds are still unable to read, write and count properly, and the extra costs facing schools this year put many budgets into crisis.
	The Government have spent millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on initiatives. They need to stop their centralising, command and control style because it has only limited success. The freedom needs to be passed to individual schools, where the professional expertise is based. It is the role of Government to create the most favourable conditions possible in which London schools may flourish, and then to take a step backwards, allow the professionals to get on with the job that they are qualified to do, and provide parents with a range of good schools from which to choose for their children. That way lies real progress.

Martin Linton: I want to start by thanking my hon. Friend the Minister and Tim Brighouse for the fantastic resources that they have put into London schools. I listened with amazement to the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) talking about her visits to schools in her constituency. When she is there, I bet that she claims some of the credit for the improvements in London schools, but when she comes here, she tells us what a dismal picture it is. I cannot believe that she gets that message from her local teachers.
	I would like to pay a similar compliment to Wandsworth, my local authority, for trying hard to improve schools in its area. I am afraid, however, that the report on Wandsworth would have to say, "Could do better." It has done little more than pass on to schools in Wandsworth the money that the Government have given them. On many occasions, it has failed even to do that, as my hon. Friend the Minister knows only too well from talking to Wandsworth. It failed to passport the full income to its schools this year, leaving them £460,000 short. It failed last year, leaving them £1.7 million short of the money that the Government were putting into Wandsworth education, which was not being matched by Wandsworth council. Actually, it held back some of that money for no other reason than to keep the council tax low. Of course, if we consider formula spending share, last year it was £7 million below that. The council has the lowest spending per secondary pupil in inner London.
	I urge the Minister and the Secretary of State, in January next year, to use their powers under the Education Act 2002 to force Wandsworth council to spend the money that the Government are investing in Wandsworth education, and to pass on to the schoolchildren of Wandsworth the benefits of a Labour Government, rather than holding them back for its own reasons.
	Although Wandsworth does not do as well as it should in terms of secondary education, there is no disputing the fact that the success of secondary schools in Wandsworth has increased impressively over the last few years, by some 12 or 13 per cent. The bulk of the credit must go to the staff, who prepare the pupils, and the pupils who sit the exams. They will be the first to say, as they say to me, that none of that could have happened without the resources that the Government have invested in education. Just in the borough of Wandsworth, the number of teachers is up by 120, and the number of classroom assistants is up by nearly 200, which is an increase of about 59 per cent. That has made such a difference to the effectiveness of schools.
	Only last week, I held a small reception out on the Terrace for a dozen members of the staff of Salesian college, a Catholic boys school in my constituency, which has in the short space of five years nearly trebled the proportion of pupils gaining 5 good GCSEs from 18 per cent. to 51 per cent. I would be the first to say that 5 GCSEs is a very crude measure of a school's achievements and does not take account of half the things that a school does for its pupils. But I am sure that that statistic tells the truth about this school and thousands like it that struggled under the previous Government to maintain standards but have blossomed and been able to increase standards dramatically under a Labour Government.
	There is only one other secondary school in my constituency. It has also more than trebled its GCSE score over the last five years, but from a much lower base. It started only five years ago at 4 per cent., one of the lowest in the country, and is now up to 14 per cent. That is in no way a lesser achievement, and may be an even greater one—it has burnt out one head teacher, and a superhuman effort has been required from the present head and his staff to get this far. Another superhuman effort will be required to achieve the target of 25 per cent. of pupils with five A to C grades this summer. The school is confident that it can achieve that, and I shall be the first to congratulate it if it can.
	But what worries me, and what I want to draw to my hon. Friend the Minister's attention, is the range between different schools in the same borough. That school—let us call it school A, as I do not want the schools themselves to be the issue—has achieved 14 per cent. Another school in the same borough—school B—has achieved 84 per cent. While school A has improved—it has trebled its proportion—school B has improved even more. That is not because school A is in a low-income area and school B is in a high-income area. School A is next to an estate on one side, but on the other side, it is little more than 100 yd from Prince of Wales drive, which is one of the smartest addresses in south London, while school B is in a part of Tooting that, with all due respect to people who live in Tooting, is nowhere near as smart. It is not a question purely of income or area.
	What worries me is that we have what educational researchers have identified as the star-school sink-school syndrome: one school on an upward cycle, and the other school painstakingly achieving progress, like pushing a boulder up a hill, but knowing that it is always precarious and unstable, and could so easily roll back down and get stuck in a downward cycle from which there is no escape. Of course, selection plays a role in that. School B was selecting 50 per cent. of its pupils only a couple of years ago. The adjudicator reduced that to 30 per cent., and then to 25 per cent. I want to return to the role of selection.
	I think we should consider at a more fundamental level the way in which choice of school works in the inner city. We almost need to consult a philosopher on some of the basic questions, but even without one to hand—my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mr. McWalter) is not here—I think we can say that choice is only real when it is a matter of personal preference. A choice between an arts-based and a sports-based school is a real choice, as is a choice between a technical and a musical school; but a choice between a good school and a bad school is no choice at all. By definition, people will choose a good school over a bad one: the definition of a school that people consider good is a school that they would choose for their own children.
	Most parents in my area use the league tables as a crude good schools guide. Asking parents whether they want a school with an 84 per cent. or a 14 per cent. success rate is not really asking them a question. That is not the definition of a good school that I would use; I would say that good schools are those that achieve the best results in the light of the pupils that they have, not those that achieve good results by recruiting high-achieving pupils. We should look at the value-added tables rather than the crude league tables.
	That, however, does not alter the basic point about educational choice and geography. In a small country town with only one secondary school there is no choice, but the very absence of choice guarantees that the school will have a good ability mix. In a larger town with two, three or four secondary schools there will be a choice, and if one school specialises in art and another in science there will be a real choice.
	In London we have some areas where the policy of diversity seems to work, but in other areas diversity has rapidly turned into hierarchy. Despite all the progress it has made, school A is still the last choice for parents in the borough, even—indeed, especially—those who live nearby. Because it is under-subscribed, it is forced to take a higher proportion of hard-to-teach pupils from across the area, which reinforces parents' reluctance to choose it. The adjudicator's recent findings emphasise that over time the current admission rules have created a hierarchy of schools, and school A is perceived to be at the bottom of that hierarchy.
	That has created a situation with which I am sure we are all familiar. Better-off parents can buy their way out of the dilemma through selective schools, aptitude, religion or train fares. In one way or another, they have a wider choice. Lower-income people are forced into the wrong school, which ends up reinforcing the problems of that school.
	The challenge from London schools is for the Government to establish a system that encourages the fair distribution among secondary schools of the pool of children available each year, so that no London school need take more than its fair share of disadvantaged pupils, and so that every school in London benefits from a critical mass of high-achieving pupils whose high aspirations will set standards and, in the process, raise the aspirations of the whole school. Only then will parents be able to choose between different styles of school according to their specialism or ethos—all those schools being of equal worth in the eyes of both parents and teachers.
	This year in Wandsworth we piloted the new admission system, which will operate throughout London next year. However, while it may be efficient, the new system will not tackle the issue of fair distribution. Secondary school places will still be allocated on the basis of the various existing admission criteria, which are often divisive and tend to be applied in terms of competition between schools for the brightest pupils rather than collaboration to share out those who are harder to teach.
	We have seen the new co-ordinated admission system in action. The divisive admission policies promoted by Wandsworth over the years have continued to contribute to the polarisation of secondary schools in the borough. At one end are schools that no one wants to go to; at the other end are schools that parents fight to get their children into. At the beginning of April, 194 parents of year 6 children in my constituency were told that Wandsworth could not offer them any of the schools that they had requested, having been asked to offer at least four and up to six. Obviously offers will be made over the coming months, but Wandsworth's initial response was zero. Meanwhile, 670 places in Wandsworth had already been offered to out-of-borough applicants.
	If we are serious about raising standards in London secondary schools, which I know we are, we need a system that financially rewards secondary schools with more inclusive admission policies. I believe that the technical term is "weighted capitation". Such a system would send all schools the clear message that adopting admission policies geared towards maximising the social mix is not just socially desirable, but financially beneficial to them.

Geraint Davies: Is my hon. Friend suggesting that much greater weight should be given to requiring schools to take at least a proportion of pupils from their immediate vicinity, and that in the case of voluntary aided and foundation schools with a wider catchment mobility should be limited? Is he saying that there should be more local choice?

Martin Linton: I am not really saying that more weight should be given to how far people live from a school. We have a problem with that in Battersea, which I will explain shortly. I am, however, suggesting that we should consider banding systems to ensure that schools take a certain number of pupils from each ability range and do not end up with a preponderance of more able pupils, which by definition would create schools elsewhere in the system with a preponderance of less able pupils.
	I want to say something about the powers of the adjudicator, which are critical to the Government's attempts to allow parents to reduce the level of selection. We have had two or three adjudicator reports on secondary education in Wandsworth, supported by many north Battersea parents who feel that their choices have been artificially restricted by selective schools in other parts of the borough. That has led the adjudicator to force schools to reduce their proportion of selected children on three occasions.
	Last year three schools were forced to reduce the proportion. One appealed through Wandsworth council, which took the Government to court and won. The adjudicator approached the position cautiously and conservatively, reducing the proportion incrementally from 50 per cent. to 30 per cent. and then from 30 per cent. to 25 per cent., but, extraordinarily, the few powers possessed by the adjudicator have effectively been overturned by the court. I think the Minister and his colleagues should look seriously at the Education Act 2002 to establish whether it can be strengthened to ensure that the few weapons we have enabling us to create a fairer education system in London are preserved. Otherwise there is the possibility of an appeal from parents to the adjudicator for an increase in the amount of selection in Wandsworth, as well as the possibility of the court's overruling the adjudicator in favour of a more selective approach. After all, that has happened twice already.
	My hon. Friend mentioned the distance between people's homes and schools. The situation in north Battersea is anomalous: we have only two secondary schools, one of which is for Catholic boys. The other, which I have described, is still at a low level compared with some, despite its heroic efforts. The adjudicator found in his last report that
	"parents and children living in the Battersea area have a much lower likelihood of gaining a place for their child at schools with the highest levels of pupil attainment".
	In other words, people who live in north Battersea are in the worst possible position to get their children into high-achieving schools. I would certainly recommend them to consider the schools that are there, because they will often educate their children far better than is realised, but I understand the feeling of many parents that they are in a black hole because there are no high-achieving secondary schools in their area.
	Those are the people who lose out on distance grounds. A map in my office shows the radius from which the different secondary schools in Wandsworth will take pupils, and very few of those concentric circles, all based in Putney and Tooting, reach as far as anywhere in my constituency. On distance grounds, people living in north Battersea have no chance of qualifying for any secondary schools in the area except for the one or two that are so undersubscribed that they have no alternative but to accept any child who applies.
	That means that parents have very little choice. We have to understand the special way in which school selection operates in a city such as London. Every child probably has 15 or 20 schools to choose from within an easy travel area. Many of those schools will rule them out on distance grounds, but there is still that possibility. The statistics suggest that on average, middle-class children in London travel 3 miles to school whereas children from lower-income families travel 1 mile. What prevents school choice from being a reality for many people in my constituency is not only that they do not have any high-achieving secondary schools near them but that they could not afford to pay the fares if they applied for a school in another borough or a long way away. My constituents are caught in a double bind, and it is very difficult for them to have the options that we want all children to have at their disposal: a choice of schools, a diversity of schools, well-resourced schools and high-achieving schools. I look forward to hearing the reply of my hon. Friend the Minister.

Simon Hughes: This is a welcome and timely debate for London Members. I pay tribute to the way in which the Minister and the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) made their contributions, and I shall seek to follow in their positive, constructive style and manner.
	I declare my interest: beyond being a local Member of Parliament, I chair the governing body of St. James's primary school, a Church of England primary school, and I am a trustee of Bacon's city technology college. Just so no one picks me up on this, I opposed the setting up of Bacon's city technology college, but I now think that I was wrong. However, I was not wrong about the fact that it should have an appeals system against refusal to admit a pupil. The Government still have not conceded that, and if I could have one small wish granted it would be that there should be an independent appeals system for all non-fee-paying secondary schools in London, including city technology colleges. That has been bouncing around on the Government's agenda for a while, and it is really disgraceful that it has not yet happened. I hope that it will happen soon for every London secondary school, whatever its name, title or status.
	I join the Minister and others in paying tribute to all those who work in schools and for schools: the teaching staff and all the other staff making up the increasing numbers in the school family. We all agree that we have in London the biggest challenges of anywhere in the country, not just because of the diversity of our population and our language mix but because of the fantastic mobility of the teacher and pupil population. My constituency has about 25 per cent. mobility, so about one in four families move home every year. In looking at a school's success, that means that teachers there do much less well in adding value, because they have each year a huge churn of pupils with whom to work, than those in stable communities in rural England. When looking at relative performance, we have to be honest about the differential factors that apply, of which that is a crucial one. Informed people know about it, but it is easy to be ignorant of it.
	I pay tribute to the Government, who since taking office in 1997 have clearly identified a need to examine and sort out London education. They have given great commitment to that, and I express my unqualified gratitude. The London challenge programme is very welcome, and local education authorities and local authorities of all political colours have sought to respond positively and constructively to it. I say that, too, without qualification. However, I will list, because it is my team duty to do so, those boroughs that are led by my colleagues, although they are doing the same as Conservative and Labour boroughs. They include two different types of borough. Kingston and Sutton have very different academic profiles and issues from Lambeth, Islington and my borough, Southwark, but all those boroughs are seeking to get much better education for all their pupils.
	Some separate groups of people deserve to be applauded. The Minister rightly applauded the Teach First initiative. I have seen the initiative at work, and I second that. However, I shall list another four groups which make a huge difference in all our schools, certainly in my experience, and shall signal one example of good practice in each category. The first is the business community, which often comes into schools. At London Bridge in my constituency there is a large PricewaterhouseCoopers office, which has contributed phenomenally to the education system by bringing in business people to assist in mentoring and other ways. It has made an excellent contribution. The second group is the cultural community. An English National Opera production is being put on today at the Coliseum, involving lots of London schools who have been working on it for months. ENO has done brilliant work in schools all over London for many months, raising the sights and aspirations of people who would never even have thought about opera, let alone considered going to or taking part in one. They have realised that that can give them great added value.
	The third group is those at the other end of the cultural spectrum. Millwall football club has been brilliant at going into schools in the community, with community programmes in and after school. Other football and sports clubs have also done that. Fourthly, there are faith groups. A Christian group which received the Queen's Jubilee Award in the voluntary sector, XLP, based in Peckham, goes to schools in lunch hours and undertakes assemblies and out-of-school activity. It has done brilliant things in getting youngsters to take part in all kinds of music and arts, and helping them to do so with a pride and quality that they might not otherwise have had. There are all sorts of people who make up the community of energy in our schools, to whom we must pay tribute.
	We are obviously discussing at all types of school, including nursery, primary and secondary schools, sixth forms and pupil referral units, but, following the hon. Member for Upminster, I want to mention special schools as well. Throughout my career, I have always said that there is a good place for special schools and a good case for them to remain. A brilliant school in my constituency, Spa school, deals with children and young people with autism, and is excellent—a high-quality, caring school. A school for children with severe learning and other disabilities, including physical needs, Cherry Garden school, does work of huge quality in all sorts of ways. I would defend to the last ditch the right for special schools to exist and the right for parents to choose them, rather than have every special school pupil integrated where that is inappropriate.
	We need to assess how we are doing, and I want to reinforce the plea that we should not just look crudely at league tables. They are an unfair, inappropriate way of making assessments. It is value added that counts: assessing children as they arrive and as they leave. Only that can be the measure of a school's success, and even that must be qualified by the variations in the school community when people move in and out of the school.
	What has been happening? The Government have been going down the road of having different types of school, and I do not dissent from that. We are in the middle of a period of debate about choice. More different types of school, with more names and characteristics, are going to be proposed by different parties. In itself, that is not a bad thing. A city technology college that does its job well and enhances technology learning is a good thing, and the Minister knows that I supported the city academy idea before many of his colleagues in Southwark. I visited Ministers and people in Downing street about that, and the City of London academy, which happens to have been built in my road, although not by my choice, is a hugely welcome initiative. It started on a temporary site in Peckham and is moving to Bermondsey later this year. That is a brilliant development, involving nearly 700 new places, of which all but a few go to Southwark children, with a few going to the City of London.
	Other schools have changed their status, including Warwick Park, which has become a city academy. I pay tribute to Lord Harris of Peckham, a Conservative peer who has put money into schools in his borough and into schools elsewhere in London. In doing so, he has begun to transform them into schools which people want to go to, rather than the opposite.
	On recognising value, there are more such schools in the pipeline. Notre Dame Roman Catholic girls school near the Elephant and Castle has twinned with Sacred Heart school in Camberwell. Notre Dame and Sacred heart have language status, which is really important, because its community consists of people from all over the world. There is a huge Latin American community, for example. Archbishop Michael Ramsey school draws people from all over Southwark, and Aylwin Girls school is seeking new status. I should also mention St. Michael's Roman Catholic school in Bermondsey. Such developments give schools status and recognition, which is welcome.
	I want to pick up on a hugely important point made by the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton). Every year, I go through the trauma and grief of having many families come to see me about their choice of London secondary schools. Such choice is often a tragic delusion. To say to London parents, "You have a choice" is just not true. At this time of year, there are thousands of families in this capital city who have made their choice of secondary school, but have not been given a place in any of the schools that they have chosen. Having more independent schools with a greater number of independent admissions policies does not produce a fair choice of schools for the pupils and families who are applying. It does not necessarily produce greater equality of opportunity for the people whom we seek to represent.
	I am absolutely clear, therefore, that Londoners need a diverse variety of schools—so that they can choose one that specialises in sport, languages, technology, arts, science or whatever—but they must also have a common admissions system. Nobody would seek to argue that there should not be a common university admissions system; indeed, it would be bizarre to argue that there should not be equality of process. London schools must also have such equality, but all must take part. It would be completely unacceptable—I say this as a member of the Church of England—for Church schools not to take a full part. Church of England schools, Roman Catholic schools and all other faith schools must take part; indeed, it would be selfish and immoral of them not to do so.
	I sincerely hope that such schools do play a full part, because it would be quite wrong for them to seek a status that separates them from the rest. The city academies and the city technology colleges must also take part, and all secondary schools in London must be part of that process; otherwise, it will not be fair, and the intended outcome will not be achieved. Our university admissions process does not take the view that, because Selwyn college, Cambridge had an Anglican foundation, or because University college London had a secular foundation, they should not be part of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. The reality is that one has to go through the system, and all London schools should do so as well.
	Of course London needs to build new schools and to re-start failing schools, but success in this city will have arrived only when every parent and youngster is happy to go to every single school. We will know that we have arrived when every parent says of every school in Battersea, Bermondsey, Southwark, Upminster, Chipping Barnet or anywhere else, "It may not be exactly where I wanted, but I am very happy that my child goes there."
	If we are going to have a common admissions system for all non-fee-paying schools, I hope that it will apply to all schools, process applications quickly and prevent people from holding on to more than one place, as currently happens. However, a second step is needed: to ensure greater reconciliation of admissions policies in each borough. As the hon. Member for Battersea rightly said, at the moment, if one conducts admissions by distance, the anomaly arises whereby places in certain boroughs do not get nearly as many opportunities as others, because they do not have as many schools near to them. In a borough such as mine, which has a lot of Church schools, one has a much better chance of getting into a secondary school if one is a Roman Catholic or an Anglican. Other boroughs have almost no Church schools.

Kate Hoey: I am very interested in the hon. Gentleman's line of argument. Would he also argue that schools should not be able to select on the basis of sex?

Simon Hughes: No. There needs to be choice: we need boys schools, girls schools and mixed schools. As we know, the issue is that more parents of girls want their children to go to single-sex schools than do parents of boys. In Southwark, we have ended up with a shortage of boys schools, because the former Inner London education authority closed some of them. Now, we have suddenly realised that there is an imbalance. The issue is difficult. In my judgment, it is better to go to a mixed school because such schools are more like society in the real world; however, people should be able to choose.

Geraint Davies: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that all Church schools should be part of a co-ordinated scheme, or that the current common admissions policy should apply, whereby they cannot use religious criteria to filter out certain people? Is it by definition fair if they simply join the co-ordinated scheme?

Simon Hughes: The hon. Gentleman is right, and there are two issues. First, all schools in London should be in the system. People should not be able to get into a secondary school unless they apply through the common admissions policy. Secondly, as the hon. Gentleman and I well know, we are long way from having a common set of admissions criteria. My personal view—I say this a Christian, a member of the Church of England and the chairman of governors of a school—is that no faith school or non-community school should be allowed to have more than 25 per cent. of pupils from the faith or denomination in question. Otherwise, there is disproportion, and problems can arise if one sets up Buddhist schools, Muslim schools and so on, because they can lead to racially divided schools. That is not my party's view, but it happens to be mine.

Angela Watkinson: I was dwelling on what the hon. Gentleman said about admissions to faith schools. Does he agree that one main reason for the success of denominational schools is that everybody—pupils and parents—subscribes to their ethos? If a significant proportion did not, the whole nature of such schools would change.

Simon Hughes: I understand that argument, but I do not accept it. I visited a Muslim school in Brent the other day and I have visited many other such schools. In my view, many people buy into a school's ethos even if it is not their own personal ethos. Many people who do not go to church want their children to go to a Church school because they like the ethos, and because they want their children to be brought up in a school that is run according to Christian principles. It is a matter of judgment as to whether 50 per cent. of pupils need to be practising Christians. In my judgment, one can sustain the ethos of any school—be it a Jewish, Buddhist or Muslim school—provided that a quarter or more of pupils come from the background in question. That said, the issue is of course open to debate.
	I am clearly against the Greenwich judgment, which is wrong. It is sad that the Tories and Labour did not repeal it—[Interruption.] If I might have the Minister's attention for a second, I encourage him to repeal that judgment and I shall tell him why. Of course, there are schools that are near boundaries, but one builds up communities by allowing people to go to a school that is in their borough. A school must be able to say, "You live in this borough, so we are going to give you priority." At the moment there is flight all over London, as we all know, which does nothing to enhance community.
	Of course people must be expected to travel to school; indeed, in rural areas there is often only one school and people have to travel for miles. But the Greenwich judgment is bad for communities and for community building, and I ask the Government to look at it again seriously. To do so would be of equal benefit to the much more prosperous boroughs such as Richmond, for which my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) is the Member of Parliament, and to boroughs such as Lambeth and Southwark. It is not going to be more disadvantageous to inner London.

Kate Hoey: I agree wholeheartedly with that. Does the hon. Gentleman realise that the effect can be seen in the new academy in Lambeth, which was fought for and campaigned for so strongly by Lambeth parents, who were so short of secondary places, only for them to discover that nearly half the pupils would come from Wandsworth, making it no longer feel like a Lambeth school?

Simon Hughes: As so often, the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) and her neighbour agree across the borough divide.
	During the year, people also arrive in London and seek school admission. We need the ability to tell a school that it must up its numbers to accept pupils who are without a school in the middle of the year. Only small numbers are involved, but taking a rigid view that no child can ever be admitted because the school is full is not right. In fact, the school may be full in notional number terms but not physically full and I hope that attitudes can be changed in that respect.
	On pupil and staff numbers, recruitment and retention, I want to reinforce the point that I made earlier: we must look seriously into the falling number of qualified primary school teachers. I have the Government figures from parliamentary answers and it is clear that the pupil-teacher ratios are worsening in primary schools. Yes, school assistants and others are available, but at the end of the day we need enough teachers to do the job. How do we recruit more of them, and what are the priorities?
	There is a real need to recruit more men to teach, particularly in primary schools. There is a real need in London to recruit primary school teachers from the minority ethnic communities and from the black community so that we have an ethnic mix with appropriate role models. There is also clearly a need to do something about senior management. The Government are alert to the view that some school principals, heads and senior staff are brilliant, but some, bluntly, are not. My view is that there should be a five-year contract, which would allow us to get rid of senior staff after five years if they were not up to scratch. We have to be ruthless about that. Unless there is a good person leading the school, the school will not do well. I hope that we will look further into that problem. Finally, we need to provide more housing in London. The Government have made a good start, but we are not nearly there yet.
	I now have time only for a shopping list in respect of what further needs to be done. Please will the Government pick up on the point that one of the Minister's predecessors acknowledged was important some years ago—starting mentoring in the last year of primary school so that it follows through into the secondary school when, for all sorts of reasons, initiative may drop off?
	Secondly, let us go on encouraging play and sport, recreation and swimming. The old political correctness of the 1980s—that competitive sport is no good—has left a sad legacy. Schools desperately need things for energetic young people to do. To be honest, the more swimming and other sports that schools can offer, the better.
	Thirdly, the Minister is right—and the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) has been brilliant on the issue—that unless we improve the performance of black teenagers and white working-class teenagers, London is in big trouble. In that context, we have to bring down the number of exclusions, particularly of black teenagers, because otherwise we will create an enormous social problem. I disagree fundamentally with what appears to be the new Tory policy. There should always be the possibility of appeal against a decision to exclude. Occasionally, schools can get into a mindset against a particular pupil without very good reason. In those circumstances, there must be an independent appeals system.
	We must remember that, at 14, a non-academic pupil may want to go out and do some work. Sitting at the back of a boring class is not much use for such pupils and the more chance they have of gaining work experience from 14, the better.
	New buildings are great and we should support the Government in replacing the poor buildings, but we need the buildings and facilities to be open throughout the week, not just in school hours. We also need genuine community facilities.
	Finally, my colleagues in Southwark would never forgive me if I failed to mention the need for more money. We are waiting for the comprehensive spending review and I gather that the building schools for the future programme has not sorted out the funding gap between the resources provided by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and those provided by the Department for Education and Skills. My colleagues are awaiting the reconciliation that will allow the schools to be built.
	I finish with the point that the best investment is not in the buildings, but in the people—the heads, the staff, the teachers and then the pupils. We can make do with a relatively ropey building if the right people are in it. We are moving in the right direction. I salute the Government, but I hope that they get admissions and appeals right and that we get the Greenwich judgment repealed. We will then be moving even further in the right direction than we are now.

Roger Casale: I welcome the Minister's remarks and his invitation to rise to the London challenge. Some people visiting my Wimbledon constituency today may believe that the only person facing a serious challenge is a certain tennis player called Tim Henman. However, not just Tim Henman, but every single child in our schools is important.
	I hope that the people entering my constituency this week will take the opportunity to look around it. If they did, they would see a great deal of energy, adrenalin and excitement being expended in a range of activities in our primary schools. They would see the Priory Church of England school, which recently was awarded a gold arts mark for promoting arts activities for young children. A silver award was won by Merton Park school. They would see, as I have seen, citizenship classes taking place in primary schools to further citizenship education for young children. That is happening in Wimbledon Park school, Wimbledon Chase school, Dundonald primary school and many others. They would see AFC Wimbledon, the football club owned and managed by the fans, helping to promote sporting activities in schools such as Poplar first school, Joseph Hood primary and Hillcross primary.
	Many activities are taking place that are enriching the curriculum and promoting a more rounded education. They are all taking place in an environment in which school buildings have been rebuilt, the infrastructure has been refurbished, class sizes reduced and much more care and attention have been given to the needs and aspirations of individual pupils. All that is a direct result of seven years of Labour Government providing the necessary investment and reforms—and long may that continue. I hope that all those who come to Wimbledon this week to see the tennis will see the improvements that I am describing in my constituency's schools and will also understand that the Labour Government are responsible for them.
	The London challenge, as I understand it, is an invitation to take all that on to the next stage. Many hon. Members have been able to point to success and achievement in their constituencies and we celebrate the contribution of parents, children, teachers, governors and the local education authorities. The challenge now is to ensure that that achievement, that success and those new opportunities are available to all children from every community in London.
	We need to tackle the barriers that are holding back certain parts of our community, not least the ethnic minorities. We know that Asian children, of which there are many in my constituency's schools, are performing well and above average, not least thanks to the great value that the Asian community itself places on education, parental assistance and back-up at school. Sadly, though, we know that in other areas, not least in respect of the Afro-Caribbean community, those rates of achievement have not yet been attained.
	One of the most exciting aspects of the London challenge is that we learn to look at London as a whole. There has been a tendency to think of my borough of Merton, for example, as being a relatively affluent outer London suburb. Of course some parts of my constituency are affluent. Those looking down on St. Mary's church on people eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon tennis and seeing the green around the area could not fail to think that it is affluent. However, one needs only to visit different parts of the borough to see some of the most deprived wards in London. The formula by which money is distributed in London, and the way in which we look at educational challenges from a strategic point of view, does not always properly reflect the special needs of pockets of deprivation within certain areas of London in the best possible way. I hope that the London challenge will give a new strategic focus to the Merton challenge—the challenge that my borough of Merton faces as we work to take forward improvements in our schools. It is the key to ensuring the life chances of the next generation of people in our communities, but it is also a very important political challenge. That is because there is a relationship between the decisions that Government take about funding and the reform of public services, for instance, and the results that are achieved.
	In my constituency, many people voted Labour for the first time in 1997. They told me then, and afterwards, that they did so because they wanted improvements in our primary and secondary schools, and in the whole range of educational services. There are independent private schools in my constituency, and people continue to send their children to them. In my experience, they do so not for some sort of snob value, but because they feel that that is the only way to get the best possible education for their children. Our aim in government in the longer term must be to make sure that the best education is provided in state schools. That is why we must invest and make sure that we do not settle for average or second best. We must keep going, with new challenges being set year after year and Government after Government. It does not matter too much to me what the challenges are called, but we must keep finding a peg and a focus for the investment of more money. We must renew our determination to improve education standards, so that people want to send their children to state schools because they are the best.
	We need to make a concerted effort, and there is no room for complacency, despite the many achievements that have been seen already. We can start by looking at the schools where there have been great successes and drawing lessons from them. I was pleased to be able to attend a special evening in honour of the outgoing head teacher of Wimbledon college, a voluntary-aided Catholic school for boys in my constituency. Father Michael Holman is retiring after 10 years of service, and the evening was truly inspirational. It showed how one man, through the care and attention that he devoted to each boy in the school, was able to achieve so much in such a short time. However, Father Holman openly acknowledged that those 10 years had included periods of both Conservative and Labour Governments. He knew that, under a Conservative Government, he did not have the resources that he needed to underpin the changes and improvements that he was making to the school. That has not been the case under a Labour Government.
	The investment made by the Government has been important, but I also want to highlight the leadership shown by Father Holman as head teacher. During his incumbency, the number of students at the school has doubled, and there have been dramatic improvements in standards. Also, the facilities for all-round education—including for music, sport and the arts—have been expanded. We should acknowledge, of course, that there has been help from the Catholic Church, but that has been underpinned by the Government's commitment to education. That must continue.
	Many other schools in my constituency have achieved dramatic improvements. Ricards Lodge girls school has achieved beacon status, Rutlish school is improving strongly and both it and Raynes Park high school are applying for specialist school status. In addition, the Ursuline convent high school had outstanding results in the most recent school year.
	I want to pay tribute to all the head teachers of those schools, and to their governors and staff, for the results that have been achieved. Although those results have been underpinned by the substantial new investment that the Government have put in, they have been achieved at a time of great transition and change in Merton.
	In contrast to other boroughs in the London area, in the past few years Merton has undergone a once-in-a-generation upheaval in the organisation of its school system. We used to have a three-tier system, made up of first, middle and high schools, but now we have primary and secondary schools, with the age of transfer at 11.
	In 1998, the Merton local education authority finally decided to enter into the period of transition, and we are still feeling the effects. The final modifications and improvements to school buildings and infrastructure are still being made, and the new secondary school buildings will not be handed over until 6 August.
	I shall devote my remaining remarks to the lessons that can be drawn from Merton's experience of providing new school buildings and taking forward the transition by means of the private finance initiative process. There is much discussion about how best to lever-in new resources and invest in new school infrastructure, but Merton has hard-won experience of having done that the PFI way. I want to share some of that experience with the House, and I hope that the Minister will respond—either when he winds up the debate or at a later meeting—to some of the concerns that have arisen about how the PFI scheme was put together.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) and I sent a letter to head teachers and chairs of governors of all the secondary schools in Merton, and their responses provided much information for us about the PFI process—how it came about, how it has worked in practice, and how it looks for the future. The Catholic schools were not part of the PFI project but they also responded, and their experience means that, in a sense, we have a useful controlled experiment. If similar infrastructure renewal schemes are proposed in other parts of the country, Merton's experience offers important lessons.
	My letter received very detailed responses. I shall not go into them now but, if I may, I shall forward them to my hon. Friend the Minister for his comments. I stress that although I say that lessons can be drawn from the Merton experience, I do not mean that I—or anyone who responded to the survey—think that the PFI is either good or bad in itself, from a philosophical or ideological point of view. My aim was to determine how it has worked out in Merton in practice. We have discussed PFI-funded public projects in the past, and all hon. Members who have an open mind can see the potential benefits. However, what are the real benefits of the initiative for an organisational change on the scale that we have experienced in Merton?
	The benefits have included the radical redevelopments that I have described. We have upgraded a school infrastructure that in some cases was 40 or 50 years out of date, and we have prepared it for the 21st century. The sums of money involved have been extraordinarily large, and have included amounts of public money that have risen throughout the life of the contract. However, one head teacher—Ian Newman of Raynes Park high school—told me this morning that he considers it hard to avoid the impression that it might have been possible to do better with the amount of money that was involved.
	One particular concern is the total cost of servicing the capital expenditure on the PFI project. It is now taking up 11 per cent. of delegated budgets from schools, whereas before only 8 per cent. of budgets was spent on maintenance. A further 3 per cent. of the schools budget is paid by the LEA. All that money comes out of the overall pot available to the LEA to fund improvements and changes in our schools. Another concern that has been put to me is that when the various funding streams are consolidated, will the proportion of 11 per cent. remain the same or will it fall? If it remains the same, the actual amount schools pay from their budgets will increase. Those moneys are badly needed in schools, but they would go to finance the PFI contract.
	The head teachers who have written to me also said that the administrative savings that they thought would accrue to their schools as a result of outsourcing the management of their facilities have not yet materialised. On the contrary, several frustrations have occurred in the building and design phase and with the running of the facilities. That has resulted in increased administration costs in terms of the time that teachers and head teachers have had to spend writing to the facilities management company—in this case, Atkins— to try to resolve the problems.
	The point has also been made that the PFI partners lack a community vision. For example, small changes could have been made to a sports hall that would have allowed wider community use of the facility, but they were not allowed by the PFI partner. Ricards school, which had another new sporting facility built, was forced into having girl-only changing rooms, which again means that it will not be available for wider community use. While we appreciate the extra investment and improvements, we are concerned about how they are financed and the way in which contracts have been put together. Those factors need to be examined, so that if the exercise is repeated elsewhere, the same problems do not recur.
	I have described the problems of the management of the PFI contract, and I am grateful to Ricards school, Rutlish school and all the schools who responded to my inquiry. The problems were compounded by the age of transfer changes and perhaps one of the key lessons to be learned is not to attempt a huge PFI project—I do not know whether any others are planned in London to improve school infrastructure—at the same time as undertaking a large reorganisation project, as has happened in Merton. Despite those concerns, we are now on the other side of the changes. The buildings are in place and we are starting to see the desired improvements, including better results at key stage 3 last year. The borough is now working strongly with Kingston LEA within the context of the London challenge, and has hosted the key stage 2–3 transition collaborative working group for several London boroughs. I believe that we can overcome the difficulties and see further improvements in the future.
	The latest census figures demonstrate that my constituency has one of the highest birth rates in the country. I declare an interest as I have two young daughters, so my wife and I are partially to blame. Alongside the increase in the number of children in the borough, we need an increase in the provision of primary school places. Several hon. Members have referred to similar problems, but it is especially acute in my constituency—and has been so for several years, as my hon. Friend the Minister is aware.
	Such difficulties can be exacerbated by building developments. New houses are built to encourage families to move into the area, but corresponding provision—such as primary school places—is not made. We have had acute shortages of places in Pelham primary school for exactly that reason. Hollymount primary school has suffered similar problems as a neighbouring site was sold off by the council to fund school expansion in other parts of the borough. The numbers were wrong, and the council had to strip primary school classes out of a different area and continued to face pressure on places at Hollymount.
	As we work to improve education provision and standards, and to encourage people back into the state school sector by giving them more confidence in it, we need to take a long-sighted view of where and how expansion can take place. In particular, we must have more joined-up thinking by local authorities and in London as a whole to ensure that services—especially school provision—expand in line with new housing developments. I am sure that other hon. Members can point to examples where that unfortunately has not been the case.
	As my constituency rises to the challenge that my hon. Friend has set forth, I can point to several exciting and positive developments. We are just leaving a difficult period of transition that was made more difficult by the way in which it was funded, including the way in which the PFI was put together. However, it was the only option on offer at the time. We are pleased to have the new investment, but we had no choice about how it would be funded. The way in which it has worked out has created some unforeseen difficulties and it remains to be seen whether they can be ironed out. It has also created extra costs that exacerbate the perennial problems of outer-London boroughs, such as the funding of teachers' salaries. As my hon. Friend the Minister is aware, we pay inner-London weighting to teachers in Merton, but no account is taken of that in the funding formula. All those cost issues will worsen with the passage of time.
	My hon. Friend the Minister is familiar with many of those issues because we have corresponded and had several meetings about them. The problems are difficult to resolve, and many need London-wide solutions. We need a strategy for and a focus on London as a whole, not individual campaigns for each area. The schools in my constituency continue to face very real problems, including funding problems, some of which are getting worse.
	I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will look carefully at the experience of PFI in Merton and some of the lessons that can be learned from our experience. I hope that he will also look again at the overall London formula in the light of the representations that have been made to see what can be done to improve the situation not only in Merton but across London.
	I finish on my first point: the exciting achievements and gains that we have already seen in our schools and rightly celebrate will not be sustained, or made for everybody in our community, unless we find new ways to tackle the problems that still exist and unless we convince everyone that we have the right focus to provide the best education for children throughout the capital, from Merton to north London and from east to west.

Sydney Chapman: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Roger Casale). I am told that London's population is rising again; it has certainly gone up by about 400,000 over the past 25 years and the hon. Gentleman is clearly playing his part in that happy event.
	I should be interested to learn whether the school population is rising, too. I have not been able to find statistics on that so it would be helpful if the Minister could tell us, as I understand that people are having fewer children, and at a later age. We used to think of the typical British family as a couple with 2.4 children, but the number is now nearer 1.6.
	I come from a family of teachers, at least on my late mother's side. She was the head teacher of a state primary school, as was each of her two sisters and two brothers. It is with great pride that I tell the House that my daughter, too, has recently become a teacher and teaches in the state system in Puckeridge in Hertfordshire. It will thus come as no surprise to the House to hear that I believe that teaching is the most underpaid and undervalued of our professions and that that is a bad thing. I am also tempted to observe that my family has changed George Bernard Shaw's untrue, outdated and overworn adage; in my family, those who can, teach and those who cannot are sent into politics, although I must admit that I was for six years a teacher in a technical college.
	We were almost assaulted by statistics from the two Front-Bench speakers, but one or two of those figures are worth repeating because, to put it neutrally, great challenges face the education system in London. The population is rising. There are 2,300 maintained schools, of which more than 400 are secondary schools, catering for 1 million pupils—a fair number.
	I want to pick up on a point on which I have heard the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) wax eloquent—the extremes of wealth and poverty in our capital city. In some cases, a ward of immense wealth is cheek by jowl with a poverty-stricken area. Again, I shall rehearse one or two statistics to indicate the wealth of parts of London. Nearly a quarter—24 per cent.—of all households in London have a weekly income of more than £750, whereas the national average is 16 per cent. To take the obverse face of that coin, parts of London have the country's highest levels of child poverty and, as we have heard from both sides of the House, 43 per cent. of secondary school pupils in London are entitled to free meals, while the national average is well under 20 per cent.
	Another important point is the unequalled ethnic diversity of our capital. I understand that 42 per cent. of children in inner London speak English as a second or additional language and I am told—although I cannot believe it—that 275 languages are spoken in London's schools. To be perfectly honest, I did not know that there were 275 languages in the whole world. Those points underline the immense challenges facing our capital city in the education of its children and the special need for extra consideration and extra financial resources.
	One tends to get one's information and experience, and to draw one's conclusions, from one's own community and there is nothing wrong in that. We have teacher shortages and vacancies, although in fairness the situation has improved and the problem has lessened over the past year. However, the number of vacancies went up by 36 per cent. between 1997 and 2003, although I think the Minister will confirm that the problem has eased off. However, teacher turnover is well above the national average and in some schools it can be more than 50 per cent. a year, which brings particular problems.
	Truancy remains a problem. The Minister said that there had been a slight improvement over the past year and I am glad to hear it but, on average, 50,000 London children are not going to school every day. Sadly, the Government have failed to meet the target for reducing truancy that they set a few years ago.
	There are literacy problems. I am told that one in three of London's 14-year-olds is unable to read, write or count properly. That is an appalling statistic and it demands urgent action. Furthermore, one in four of London's 11-year-olds leaves primary school unable to read, write and count. However we look at those figures, even allowing for the ethnic diversity of London schoolchildren, they are appalling.
	London has an extremely mobile population, which is reflected in the fact that the number of children changing from one school to another, whether in the primary or secondary sector, is double the national average. The Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), said that he was very much against the Greenwich judgment and made representations to the Government to overturn it.
	My current view of the Greenwich judgment is equivocal. I certainly was against it and thought that action should be taken to legislate, because in my constituency it seemed that a high proportion of secondary schools were close to the borough boundary. As the Minister knows, Ashmole school is literally on the border; his constituency encloses two sides of the school's curtilage, while my constituency encloses the other two sides. More than half the pupils are from Enfield, with slightly less from Barnet. I can understand the argument that it is better for pupils to go to a school in their own community, which is peopled from their community, but sometimes London borough boundaries cut across communities. If the Greenwich judgment was got rid of and Barnetonians were given priority to attend schools such as Ashmole, which is essentially in Southgate, although its address is Barnet, there is a strong argument that the community would be split. So it is horses for courses, and I continue to remain ambivalent about the issue.
	I am not here to score petty political points—education is a very serious issue, and we want to find out how far we can achieve consensus—and I very much welcome what the Government have called the London business challenge to ensure that every secondary school has a link with a leading London business. For far too long in my political career, I have felt that our country's education system has been totally divorced from what children do when they grow up and, I hope, go into employment. I do not think that the linkage started with the London business challenge, but I very much welcome the greater social intercourse—I think that that is the unhappy phrase to use—between schools, business and, indeed, the rest of the community in which they exist.
	I feel very deeply, and I am somewhat critical about this, that my borough has had a very bad deal in education funding from the Government, if not this year, particularly last year, but the problems remain this year. I want to rehearse the crisis that we faced at the beginning of the 2003–04 financial year, and I honestly do not believe that the Government realised the bad impact it would have on our schools in Barnet. Just to use the simplest statistics that I can, Barnet received from the Government an additional £8.1 million in revenue support grant for all services last year. That £8.1 million may be a meaningless figure, but it represents an increase of 3.5 per cent.—slightly above the then rate of inflation.
	Although we received £8.1 million extra, we were required to pass an additional £14.5 million to the schools—equivalent to a 7.6 per cent. increase in funding. We did so because we value education very highly, but much of the huge, 24 per cent. increase in council tax was caused by the need to ensure that Barnet's schools received that extra £14.5 million. However, even that was not enough. The schools told me in no uncertain terms that they needed not a 7.6 per cent. increase, but at least an 8.1 per cent. increase to stand still. In other words, Barnet had to cover not just inflation and the above-inflation increase in teachers' pay, but find another £4.4 million for the increase in their contribution to teachers' pensions, and it had to find another £1 million on top of that in employer's national insurance contributions. All that happened when the previous year's specific grants were withdrawn and when the Government, rightly or wrongly, decided to change the schools revenue formula. So whatever happened in Barnet, some schools were less worse off, but other schools were even more worse off. Frankly, it was very difficult to find a solution to the problem.
	When Barnet was criticised by Ministers, the local education authority called in independent experts who confirmed the state of play and that Barnet was in no way to be blamed. Of course, Ministers will also recall that the Audit Commission considered the problem and discovered that places such as Barnet—I do not know how many other London boroughs were affected—had a bad deal because of the policy to transfer funds from London and the south-east to the midlands and the north. So that was a very great problem indeed, and it resulted in the schools finding in April last year that they had a budget shortfall totalling £3.7 million, even though Barnet passed on the £14.5 million extra.
	Twenty schools were forced to set deficit budgets, and the consequences were threefold. There had to be staff reductions. Although 34 redundancies are 34 too many, fortunately in one sense, 32 of them involved support staff, rather than teachers, but the tremors reverberated for many months. The schools had to resort to using so-called devolved capital, with the Secretary of State's permission. In other words, they spent less or nothing on capital development to pay for running and maintenance costs. Of course, there were reductions in school repairs and the training programme to prevent more redundancies. All that was very unfortunate. Things have improved slightly this year. The shortfall is only £1.9 million this year, but even so, 15 schools have set deficit budgets. The local education authority is working closely and carefully with those schools to discover whether those deficits can be got rid of over the next three years, but I shall return to that point shortly.
	The Minister kindly let me intervene on his speech to mention this, but the staffing problem in Barnet relates to London weighting and it is exacerbated by the fact that it is not only too low, but not so high as it is inner London. I realise that that is an immensely difficult issue. In Potters Bar, which is just down the road from the Minister's constituency and mine, people do not get any London allowance. Lines have to be drawn somewhere, but we need a much more sophisticated approach to that issue. I just repeat what my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) said from the Conservative Front Bench: the tremendous increase in the costs of living and housing in London are playing havoc with ensuring that the vital public services have an adequate number of people. The only way to deal with that problem is to consider the whole weighting system.
	The House will know that that average price of a house in the United Kingdom is now into six figures, but it is £250,000 in London and, indeed, it is £289,000 in the borough of Barnet and it is approaching £750,000 in Kensington and Chelsea. I welcome the housing initiatives, but they are only a start. The problem with London weighting must be tackled, as it is far too inadequate today, as compared with yesteryear. Of course this may be obvious, but pensioners in London receive just the same state pension as equivalent people in any other part of the United Kingdom, even though costs are much greater in London. I can only implore the Government to consider the growing problem of London weighting, especially in view of the fact that the number of applicants for teaching posts in Barnet has fallen.
	I do not know whether other London Members have experienced a problem involving out-of-year children that has surfaced in Barnet and caused a great deal of anxiety. Some parents are told that if they want their children to attend a specific secondary school, the children must either go into the second year of secondary school, or miss a year of primary school. That is caused by the 1 September factor, because if children are born before 1 September, they may go to school at the age of five, but children who are born in the middle of September effectively miss a year. That is not the fault of parents, although I concede that some make a deliberate choice to keep little Johnny back from school for a year. However, it is wrong for local education authority policy to say that a child born after 1 September cannot start in his or her peer year and to insist that such a child must miss a year of primary or secondary school. The Government and local education authorities must work with schools to resolve the problem, and I know that the Minister received a delegation from the borough of Barnet last week.
	I understand that the Government use broad indicators of deprivation and exam results to target capital funding, and there is nothing wrong with that, in theory. However, I would have thought that a major component behind decisions on capital funding levels and grants should be the state of the fabric of schools in a LEA. There is a desperate need to renovate or replace large parts of Barnet's primary school estate.
	The Government have the right to boast that they have increased expenditure on education. Although that had increased during previous years, they have accelerated the rate of increase. However, when I look at the problems in Barnet, I sometimes think that the money is not reaching the coal face. The extra finance does not seem to be getting into the schools. The situation in the classroom is the all-important matter, and that will be the litmus test that my constituents and the people of the country will use when the Government try to persuade them that they are increasing funding in education, as well as in the health service and in public transport.
	There is a London-wide problem that Governments of whatever hue must address in the years to come. The Minister will know that each year the people of London collectively put into the Exchequer through taxes £20 billion—the figure is certainly £15 billion, but it is £20 billion by my calculations—more than they receive for London's public services. If we say that we have a fair tax system, the situation occurs because London is richer than many other regions throughout the country, if not the south-east. However, in the interests of the whole nation, London, as its capital city, needs a decent system of infrastructure, and decent hospitals and schools. The £20 billion gap is becoming unfair on London, and Londoners are beginning to mind the gap—if I may use that phrase—between what they contribute to the rest of the country and what they receive to make their public services and transport systems work properly. Given the tremendous contribution that London makes, it deserves better from the Government, which is surely emphasised by the great disparity between wealth and poverty in our capital city. I started my speech by talking about that point, and I thank the House for listening to me.

Geraint Davies: It is a great pleasure to follow the 25-minute contribution made by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Sir Sydney Chapman). I appreciate that he took a little time because he is the only Conservative Back Bencher in the Chamber for this enormously important debate, despite the fact that the Conservative party is launching its manifesto pledges on education today.
	Our children's life chances are built on our educational investment and the standard of teaching delivery in our local schools. It is clear from the debate that we all know that London faces many specific challenges, such as the cost of housing, inadequate wages, the problems with London weighting that the hon. Gentleman outlined, the environment, multiculturalism, multilingualism and the problems of mobility mentioned by the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes). It is important for all those factors to be considered when calculating London's financial weighting, but despite the critical problems and the growth of costs and pressures, it is interesting to note that the formula spending share for London—the amount of funding for our schools in relative terms—has converged with that of the rest of the country over the past couple of years. Spending on London's schools is thus no longer obviously greater than that on schools outside the area, despite the fact that challenges remain.
	I take this opportunity to congratulate warmly all people who are involved in our schools because, as the Minister suggested, evidence from the London challenge shows that despite the problems that I cited, more value has been added to our primary and secondary schools in London than to those in the rest of the country. That is of great credit to those who work in the profession in London.
	We have made a lot of progress in London and elsewhere, especially on primary schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Roger Casale) talked about the possibility of people moving from the private to the public sector in the future, and I think that that is happening in primary schools. We have invested in provision for three and four-year-olds, and we are beginning to see the fruits of investing more in secondary school provision.
	Recruitment and retention have always been big challenges for London, so I am pleased by new incentives to encourage further recruitment, which are making a difference in Croydon. I give a great welcome to the £100,000 grants, or interest-free loans, that are available for teachers who have spent between four and seven years in their posts, yet might move elsewhere in the country. That scheme is beginning to make a difference in Croydon. The new agenda to encourage face-to-face youth work is being embraced and represents a valuable re-engineering of the previous budget. I welcome the co-ordinated admission approach on which the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) commented. The bottom line is that a common application system with data shared among all schools will lead to pupils getting school places earlier because people will not hold on to an excessive number of places, which denies other pupils any place at all. The system will become more transparent and efficient, and although that will not deliver more choice in itself, choice will become available earlier.
	In Croydon each year, about 1,000 pupils at secondary level—a third—move into schools in the borough and 1,000 move out. About 1,000 pupils come down from Lambeth and Southwark, while 1,000 move out to Sutton, Bromley and the private sector in three equal tranches. The pupils who go to Sutton and Bromley enter the grammar school system, so parents living in Sutton and Bromley whose children do not get into grammar schools and do not want them to enter the secondary modern system send their children to Croydon. In other words, Croydon takes some of the rejects from grammar schools in Sutton and Bromley, and people also drift down from Lambeth and Southwark. Funding is organised not on the basis of who goes to school in the area but who lives in the borough, which can cause problems. In recent years, the disparity in standards attained by children leaving Croydon and those arriving has narrowed significantly. The standard attained by children from Southwark and Lambeth, for example, has improved following the Government's investment in primary education. At key stage 2, for example, most children leaving Croydon and those arriving achieve level 4 or 5.
	Despite capping, there is still a problem with funding in Croydon. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet alluded to the basic cause—a formula change at a time of rising pensions and salaries and the requirement that teachers work a little less to focus on their core duties. I am, however, happy to report to the Minister that despite the worst fears of heads in Croydon, there were no compulsory redundancies last year, the overall school balance did not fall from £11 million to £3 million as predicted—in fact, it is stable at about £10 million—and only two schools drew on their capital. Government money has been passported to Croydon schools, but we have other problems. Council tax has been capped and the formula change has resulted in less funding for schools, but the squeeze is harder in other areas. Croydon schools have enjoyed many successes, and New Addington education action zone—now an excellence in cities project—has been particularly successful under the leadership of Pat Holland. Various schools are pushing up their standards. Recently, Addington high school achieved improvements in pipeline results. Ashburton school is using the private finance initiative to regenerate itself. I hope that the lessons described by my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon will be taken on board.
	Pupil referral units were mentioned by the hon. Member for Upminster, but it is important to remember that under this Administration all children who are excluded will receive full-time education and will not roam the streets, as they did in the Tory days, committing crimes. Seventy per cent. of children in pupil referral units in Croydon go on to further education and do not, as they did under the Conservatives, take up a life of crime and repeat offending. The Minister and other Members said that we need to focus on how well black boys in particular do in school. We need to consider whether education is successfully delivered to those children, but we also need to consider whether there is a pervasive culture of it not being cool to study. Children must be told that their future financial welfare and what they can do with their life chances will be determined by their educational output, and we need attractive role models to deliver that message.
	Other Members wish to contribute to our debate, so I shall conclude. In Croydon, the Government have invested in provision for three and four-year-olds, primary classes and secondary schools. It is crucial that we get it right in secondary schools if we are to fulfil our ambition of getting 50 per cent. of people into university. People opt out of the state sector and take up private provision so that their children can have a launch pad for university. The challenge for us is to bring those people back, as we have done in the health service and primary schools, through proper investment and quality control in secondary schools, and I am sure that we will rise to it.

Vincent Cable: I thank the hon. Member for Croydon, Central (Geraint Davies) for making a brief speech. There have been some long speeches, so he has provided me with an opportunity to speak, and I shall try to speak for less than 10 minutes so that other Members may speak.
	Our debate has clearly demonstrated a diversity of experience. There is an enormous gulf between the problems in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) and those in Twickenham. None the less, our conclusions are broadly similar. My constituency highlights not merely the different problems of inner and outer London, but the differences between primary and secondary education. We have the best results in standard assessment tests for 11-year-olds, not just in London but in Britain, which is a remarkable performance. There is a sense of excitement and achievement in local primary schools, where positive thinking is in evidence. The population is highly educated and the staff are drawn from a large pool of highly educated, professionally qualified women. The council—Liberal Democrat for many years, but now Conservative—has funded the primary school sector above standard spending assessment levels, and that is one of the many reasons why our primary schools have done extremely well.
	The secondary sector undoubtedly includes some very good schools and displays some good teaching standards, but a key statistic shows that 40 per cent. of parents migrate to the private sector. They are not escaping from bad schools—their experience is very different from that of parents in central London—but are going to the private sector because of head-to-head competition with some of the finest private independent schools in the country, including St. Paul's, Lady Eleanor Holles and Hampton. There is a graphic visual image in Hanworth road in my constituency, where two independent day schools—Lady Eleanor Holles and Hampton—are sited side by side. Next to them is a local community school, Hampton community college, which is much smaller and less well equipped. There is some good teaching there and some good pupils, but there are also challenging pupils. For a local parent with enough money to afford private education the choice is therefore a no-brainer. It is extremely difficult for the state secondary sector to maintain effective competition with the independent schools in the circumstances, and the problem is percolating down to primary schools. I recently had a slightly surreal interview with the head teacher of a highly successful junior school, whose SATs results are among the best in Britain. He was suffering from falling school rolls, because parents are taking their children out of his school to prepare them for common entrance, so that they do not miss out on an independent education.
	What are we to do about that problem? We are long past the stage of arguing that we should get rid of the independent sector. That is not going to happen, and many independent schools are fine educationally on their own terms. What is the Government's agenda on collaboration between the independent and state sector? How can that be managed in a constructive way? There have been token efforts in the past, such as the joint use of rowing clubs. There have been attempts at joint projects, none of which, as far as I know, has led to anything. Is there any way in which the currently rather competitive and destructive relationship can be made more positive?
	There is a link between that problem and the second problem, which is the Greenwich judgment. My hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) mentioned that, and I echo his remarks about its damaging effects on constituencies such as mine. It just happens that there is a perfect symmetry between the large-scale migration of pupils into the private sector and the scale of migration into the borough from other boroughs. About 40 per cent. of all places are filled by out-of-borough pupils. The two problems are linked because as more out-of-borough pupils—many of them challenging, to use the jargon word—come into the secondary schools, growing numbers of local parents send their children into the private sector. The problem becomes cumulative.
	The Greenwich judgment is damaging in several respects. Large numbers of parents feel a strong sense of grievance that they cannot get their children into local schools, whereas others from across the border can do so. That leads to a great distortion in the school building programme, because the local council of whatever party is unwilling to build schools near the frontier because they will be filled with out-of-borough pupils, so school-free zones are being created artificially by the Greenwich judgment problem. There are also serious anomalies in funding, as the hon. Member for Croydon, Central (Geraint Davies) said in an earlier intervention. Often, the migrant population coming in from other boroughs has totally different characteristics from that of the host borough. It just happens that in my case in the Hampton area, the migrant population is a deprived population, which is funded at the level of the host borough, not at that of the migrating pupils.

Martin Linton: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that some local authorities encourage high achievers from neighbouring boroughs to come into their schools, and export low achievers from their own borough to other schools?

Vincent Cable: I am sure that that happens. It is the opposite problem from the one that I am describing, where challenging pupils coming into a borough clearly need extra funding, but are not getting it. The border schools are therefore seriously under-funded and have serious educational difficulties. I raised the issue in a debate three years ago with the then Minister for School Standards, now the Minister for the Arts. She agreed that there was a problem and cited an experimental arrangement in Solihull, I think, to try to overcome the problem of cross-border movement and funding arrangements. I urge the Minister to give it his attention.
	The third issue that I shall touch on is the broader philosophy of choice and what it means. We have had sufficient examples during the debate to show the ambiguous and confusing way in which the word "choice" is used. Most of us think it means parents on behalf of their children having the right, in some sense, to choose a school. The Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson), seemed to mean the opposite—the school having the right to choose its pupils. Even the choice of a school by the parents is an ambiguous concept, as we have heard. Preference and choice might mean quite different things—cross-border or not cross-border, faith or non-faith schools, for example.
	I agree with the suggestion from my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey that we need if not standardised systems of admission, at least compatible principles. The only reasonable arrangement to reconcile the demands of different groups of parents applying for different types of school is a criterion based predominantly on distance and possibly on sibling connection, or some mix of those two factors. There would be significant drawbacks to any other arrangement, such as a lottery—it was recently proposed that applicants should be chosen by lot, which has enormous disadvantages because it breaks down any sense of geographical identity and greatly adds to transport costs and all the environmental problems associated with that. What is needed is a common set of rules based on distance and sibling relationship. If that principle were applied, much of the sense of injustice would be substantially diminished.
	I shall mention two other points briefly and then allow another hon. Member to speak. On capital funding, I echo the cautionary words of the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Roger Casale). For many years my borough was unable to achieve any capital funding whatever. In the Conservative years it was effectively barred. With the new Government we have had a considerable amount of capital spending, which is welcome, but the only basis on which that could be arranged was the private finance initiative. No other vehicle was available.
	On a purely pragmatic basis, I and my former Lib Dem council welcomed that and worked with the PFI programme. It has worked relatively well. Schools have been built and they have been completed on time. Ours is one of the few boroughs from which Jarvis emerges with a moderate degree of credit, but the programme is storing up problems. We should be frank about that. The hon. Gentleman spelled out the problems. Many schools have a commitment to a fixed set of repayment obligations, amortisation and maintenance costs that will have to be maintained, come what may.
	We are currently in a good phase of school funding—that may be partly a reflection of the Government's resources being put into schools—but there will come a time when schools are seriously squeezed for funding and they will not be able to make any economies on the maintenance side. All the cuts will have to come out of teaching. I can see the crisis looming ahead. Many of our teachers are apprehensive about it. It may be useful to hear from the Government how they would deal with the rigidity in the funding of PFI schemes.
	Finally, I shall ask the Minister about a sector of education that we have not touched on at all in the debate—the pre-school sector. There is a great deal of emphasis on the early years. I strongly support all the research showing how crucial that is to subsequent performance. My borough, together with Croydon, is one of the two that have not complied with Government requirements for free nursery education for three and four-year-olds. What action does the Minister intend to take to make sure that boroughs do comply? How does he intend to help them overcome their problem? There is a political issue. It is a Conservative-controlled council so I do not want to make excuses for it, but I am told that the council cannot meet the funding requirements for the Government's stipulations. Perhaps the Minister will explain the balance of the argument and how the council can be helped or made to comply with the statutory requirements for pre-school provision.

Geraint Davies: For the record, Croydon had a problem with compliance, but I understand that it now provides the pre-school places following negotiation with the Government.

Vincent Cable: In that case, my borough may be the last in the line. On that note, I shall allow another hon. Member a chance to speak.

Jon Cruddas: Like the two previous speakers, I shall be brief, which should allow my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) to speak.
	I welcome this opportunity to discuss education and schools in London and want to examine empirical data on outcomes. Debates about public services are too often based on an abstract conception of the efficiency of public or private provision. In contrast, I want to examine what is happening locally on the ground, with reference to education and attainment in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, where a dramatic change, which throws up important issues on the links between attainment and class, is occurring.
	The hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) touched on that point when she discussed Robert Clack school, which is situated in the middle of a series of housing estates and has experienced an extraordinary transformation under the headship of Paul Grant and his senior management team. The school is an example of good practice, which I am sure figures heavily in the Minister's approach, and it has broken some assumptions on class and attainment.
	I shall briefly rehearse a couple of economic statistics about Barking and Dagenham, which is traditionally seen as a predominantly white, working-class community, but which is now one of the fastest-changing boroughs in Greater London. With a population of approximately 150,000, however, Barking and Dagenham is the smallest borough in London. Only 3.5 per cent. of its adult residents have a higher education qualification, compared with a London-wide average of 18.5 per cent. Poor levels of adult numeracy and literacy are recorded among the borough's population—it is respectively the second and fourth worst borough in the country on adult numeracy and literacy.
	The long-term track record on GCSE results in Barking and Dagenham is poor—in 1992, only 15.5 per cent. of pupils achieved five or more GCSEs at grades between A* and C. Overall, the borough may be characterised as having historically low levels of attainment. The consequence of that record has been the production of stocks of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, who work in car assembly or construction in the immediate community.
	Dagenham and Barking sits at the centre of the so-called Thames gateway. East London is beginning to experience an economic and social transformation, and Dagenham is at the centre of that process. Ford has diversified from car assembly to high quality engine production, and tens of thousands of jobs have been generated in docklands and Canary Wharf, which throws up skills-based challenges for my constituents.
	On the role of the state, the two key transmission belts to enable local people to plug into that economic transformation are first, capital infrastructure to enable people to travel to the sites where jobs are generated, and secondly, the creation of a training and skills profile to allow local communities to access those economic changes. The real problem is that that unique opportunity for my constituents will be missed if we do not secure the right balance between capital infrastructure projects, skills provision and investment in education and training.
	The evidence of change in the borough is overwhelming and dramatic. In 1996, 27 per cent. of pupils obtained five of more GCSEs at grades between A* and C. At that time, the national average was 45 per cent.—in short, the borough was 18 per cent. behind the national average. Last year, 49 per cent. of pupils gained five or more GCSEs at grades between A* and C and the national average was 53 per cent. The point is that the borough is only 4 per cent. behind the national average, and that the gap has been reduced by 14 percentage points since 1996. The key stage 4 results are paralleled by developments at key stages 1, 2 and 3. Overall, between 2002 and 2003 the borough secured a 7.4 per cent. increase in five A* to C grades—among the highest in Greater London and, indeed, the country. The average for Greater London was some 3.1 per cent.
	Six of the eight secondary schools in the borough are in my constituency. I pay tribute to the heads—Des Smith, Paul Grant, Anne Brooks, Roger Leighton, John Torrie and Stephen Smith—for all their hard work. Last year, all those schools improved, and the A* to C grades of one, All Saints, improved from 68 per cent. to 87 per cent. Two others—Roger Clack and Sydney Russell—jumped by more than 10 per cent., and Priory and Eastbrook schools jumped by 5 per cent. Those statistics demonstrate that we are witnessing a major transformation locally. Our comparators now tend to have a different socio-economic profile from those of the past 10 years.
	At the same time, a major push is occurring on adult learning. We are confronting the numeracy and literacy problems that I mentioned earlier, and the borough is working closely with the trade union movement to enhance the education and training that is available to its staff. For example, over the past 12 months, 75 out of 76 refuse collection workers signed up to a basic skills course. I pay tribute to the groundbreaking work of the borough's union learning representatives, especially those in the GMB.
	A transformation is under way that is beginning to break the link between poverty and attainment—or at least to challenge some of the assumptions about that link. It is redistributing life chances to people in the borough and allowing them to plug into the process of regeneration that leads to better jobs and a material change in the conditions that they and their families experience. People often say that the Government are not radical, but what is happening as a result of the education and skills agenda in my borough is genuinely radical. I do not say that as a shameless advocate of all Government policy: I have problems with top-up fees and some aspects of academies, but those can be saved for another time.
	I pay particular tribute to Roger Luxton and his team at our local LEA. They have done an extraordinary amount of work over the past few years and are trying to confront the long tail of under-achievement among many working-class white children in my community. There is a long way to go. It is a long-term process that takes time—there is no big bang—but the hard groundwork for implementing durable change year on year has been established. The focus is on basic literacy and numeracy, with resources and a strong strategic lead provided by the LEA. Staying-on rates are improving. Turning the situation around will take time, but we have found that change is possible. I believe that this agenda is consistent with the objectives of the Labour party in terms of delivering material, economic and social change for working-class people. For my constituents in London, our schools agenda fulfils that historic objective, and I very much welcome it.

Karen Buck: I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas) for being brief. I want to make only a couple of points.
	I come to this subject not only as a politician representing a constituency that, despite its leafy-sounding name, has the ninth-highest entitlement to free school dinners in the country, but as the parent of a 10-year-old who will go into secondary school transfer in the autumn. From that perspective, I can see the best and the worst of the issues that affect London schools.
	The best is represented by the state primary school that my son attends. My hon. Friend the Minister visited it a short while ago. Although it rarely troubles the upper echelons of the primary school league tables, it is a happy and successful learning community. In response to the negative coverage about multi-ethnic London that has recently appeared in the press, especially The Sunday Times, I would say that my son, who attends a school where his closest friends are Iraqi, Algerian, Libyan, Congolese and Kosovan, is not only accommodating as best he can a burden of multi-culturalism, but experiencing the single best, richest and most life-enhancing aspect of education that any child could have. We must recognise that a multi-ethnic and multi-language community can enhance learning in schools. I am happy to say that The Independent wrote a good story about that at the end of last week. Although the mobility and poverty that are sometimes associated with the change to a more multi-ethnic educational environment can present problems, such an environment offers children an opportunity to enhance their learning ability and we should cherish it.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) presented far better than I could the important argument that the advance towards the range of specialist schools that we are developing entails a genuine risk that a minority of schools will compound disadvantage. Speakers from all parties said that we want to capture whatever makes a successful school environment and ensure that that quality is disseminated more widely. I am not sure that we can capture that quality easily and without change when successful schools draw on selection and, in some areas—for example, in central London—there are single-sex schools and faith schools. Parents of no faith, those whose faith is not compatible with existing faith schools and parents of boys in areas where the gender balance in schools is distorted by the existence of single-sex schools nearby do not have such a range of choice.
	My main point is about behaviour—we have heard much about that subject. Today, the Conservative party launched policies on exclusion and pupil referral units, although we did not hear about that in the debate. We all know that behavioural problems exist, especially in some schools. One school in my constituency struggles with an almost insuperable burden. More than a quarter of its children are looked after. That is a complete distortion of a balanced school environment.
	The pressures and problems in schools that can lead to exclusions do not need to be solved by the removal of a stratum of pupils and their effective abandonment. Good pupil referral units can make a valuable contribution, but children should not be removed from a learning environment and abandoned in units or marginalised schools unless it is absolutely essential. An alternative exists in my constituency and I invite the Minister to visit it. Indeed, the Green Paper, "Every Child Matters" mentioned it. It offers a way through behavioural difficulties and exclusion, and, in my constituency, mental health problems, refugee trauma, alcohol and drug dependency and domestic violence. All those problems affect a child's behaviour and capacity to learn. The Marlborough education unit works to tackle that.
	The Marlborough unit provides a superb support system to schools. It deals with some of the most disturbed children and families and provides an environment that allows them to cope with learning. It receives 20 family referrals a week and can cope with 60 family assessments a year. The scope for opening up such a provision so that it can conduct outreach work in schools and have pupils and families attending its service, thereby giving our most damaged pupils high level therapeutic support, is enormous. Investment in such facilities, especially the Marlborough unit, which has a superb record, but also many other sorts of facility throughout the capital, could do more to help our schools, reduce exclusion and enable our most damaged children to gain from their learning environment than any other measure.
	I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will at least recognise that such valuable services are being provided in London and that there is massive scope for more. Assistance for that is as important as anything else we can do to invest in schools, welcome and necessary though such investment is. We need to look beyond the school environment as well as in it if we are to tackle some of the problems.

Stephen Twigg: With the leave of the House, I shall endeavour to respond to as much of the debate as I can in my 10 minutes. It has been an excellent, wide-ranging and good-humoured debate, mostly characterised by consensus and constructive discussion about how to meet some of the challenges that we face.
	There were two main issues up for debate, particularly in some of the earlier contributions, the first of which, the role of the Government, was introduced by the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson), whom I welcome to her new position in opening for the official Opposition. That issue strikes at the heart of the debate on education policy generally that is going on beyond the Chamber. She used the phrase "command and control", but what we are doing with the London challenge is very different from that. It is about sharing the best practice in what is happening in schools and communities in London, and it is critically important that that should be conducted in a spirit of collaboration. A concern that Labour and Liberal Democrat Members share about Conservative policy is that it seems to represent a return to a competitive ethos between schools in an era when we are increasingly encouraging collaboration between them.
	The second issue is choice in our London schools. The small amount of time that I have now does not enable me to deal with all the thoughtful contributions that have been made by Members on both sides of the House on this issue. However, we can agree that, for real choices to be available in communities across London, capacity is required, and in many of our communities that capacity simply is not there. Diversity is also required, because if all the schools are the same, there is no choice. Information is required, because if information is not available to everyone, the process becomes very unequal; and for the process to be really effective, it requires collaboration. Choice is not only about which institution parents decide to send their child to at the age of 11; it is also about the choices that are available within the education system for children and young people themselves, and that will be critical as we take forward the 14-to-19 curriculum.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) made a powerful case for the benefits that a multi-ethnic London brings. I totally agree with what she said, and I shall also take up her offer to visit the Marlborough unit in her constituency to see what lessons we can draw from it.
	Our debate has mostly achieved consensus, but I want to take a moment to respond to some of the party political points that were made, perfectly legitimately, by the hon. Member for Upminster. I concur with the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), who said that a feature of the policy announced by the Conservatives today about choice was a move towards schools having more choice about which pupils they took, rather than parents having more choice about the institutions that their children could attend. That would be a deeply damaging development and a move in entirely the wrong direction.
	The hon. Member for Upminster also raised the issue of appeal panels, to which the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) responded. It is worth getting this issue into perspective. I respect the fact that schools are concerned when they lose appeals, but there were only about 1,000 such appeals in the last year, of which 200 were successful. If we did not have independent appeal panels to address these issues, there would be a real danger that at least some of the parents involved would go to the courts. Do we really want to tie up our head teachers in defending their actions in the courts? The independent appeal panels provide a sensible way forward.
	The hon. Members for Upminster and for Chipping Barnet (Sir Sydney Chapman) referred to the number of children who cannot read or count at the age of 11 and 14. In doing so, they repeated some of the comments made by the Leader of the Opposition this morning. We all recognise the challenge of improving literacy and numeracy in our schools; too many young people leave primary school at 11 unable to read, write or do maths to the expected level. However, it does not help the debate to describe them as being "unable to read" or "unable to count", or by denying the very real progress that has been made in our schools. Last year's key stage 3 results in London were the best ever. We have moved from the position that we inherited in 1997, when the number of children leaving primary school unable to reach the expected level in English and maths was two in five, or 40 per cent. The present figure was rightly described by the hon. Lady as one in four, or 25 per cent. Twenty-five per cent. is too much, but it is a lot better than the 40 per cent. that we inherited from the Conservative party.
	More consensually, the hon. Member for Upminster made a number of powerful points. She referred to the work that we are doing in relation to ethnic minority achievement with "Aiming High", and gave a plug to Winchmore school in my constituency. I want to reassure her on special schools, and the important role that they will continue to play within inclusive education, as they can contribute to an inclusive approach to education in London and other parts of the country. She praised Robert Clack school, and her comments were reinforced by my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas), in whose constituency the school is located. She raised a concern about the new London school admissions service, and asked perfectly reasonably who will benefit. Her test is right—it is not about a more efficient bureaucratic process but about benefiting parents and pupils. All of us, as constituency MPs, will have visited schools in which there is a child in the front row who has three school offers, and a child sitting next to him or her who has none. Months of anxiety are suffered by that child and his or her parents and family, which is what we seek to address with the new admissions service—it is not a cure-all, it will not solve all the problems, but it will lessen the anxiety in the process.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) raised the question of the School Teachers Review Body and its consultation process, and several related points were raised by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet and my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Roger Casale) on London allowances. I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton was referring to proposals that the STRB has made on regional pay, to which, as he rightly said, the Department must respond in September. We are examining with interest the proposals on regional pay, including proposals for greater flexibility, on which a number of right hon. and hon. Members have made points. We will respond in the autumn. As a Department, we will examine the different challenges faced by inner and outer London in formulating that response.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) reminded me of the position with regard to Wandsworth and school funding this year. I concur with him that what we seek is for Wandsworth to passport all the money next year when it makes its budget. He spoke of measuring success and the importance of value added, and the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey made the same point. I agree that a robust measure of the real progress made by children in a school is the best way of holding schools to account. It is not the only way—we need to examine all sorts of other factors, too—but the availability of that is important.
	I thank the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey for his positive remarks about the London challenge generally, and was struck, listening to him in his constituency capacity, by how some of these strands are coming together positively to benefit the people of his constituency, particularly through the academy programme, but also in the broader sense of schools serving their community. I differ from him on the Greenwich judgment, very much for the reasons given by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet: communities in London do not necessarily match school boundaries. He gave an example from our constituency boundary, and my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) gave an example from Clapham, part of which is in Lambeth and part of which is in Wandsworth. Another recent example was of Camden trying to change its admissions practices, which would have had the effect that schools on the Camden-Islington border that traditionally served both boroughs might have served only one of them. The position in respect of the Greenwich judgment is more complex than the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey set out.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon asked specific questions about the private finance initiative in Merton. I undertake to respond to him on that. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet mentioned funding in Barnet, and the issue of out-of-year children, with which I am involved—as he rightly said, I met a delegation on the matter last week. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, Central (Geraint Davies) talked about some of the progress in Croydon, and how Croydon's schools have dealt with some of the funding difficulties a great deal more successfully than had been feared. The hon. Member for Twickenham asked about collaboration between independent and state schools, which is fundamental to our chances of success on the London challenge. I will write to him with more detail about how we are bringing that about, so that we can tap into all the educational success and excellence in London.
	I thank everyone who has taken part in what has been a wide-ranging and important debate. I am confident that we will be able to take this area—
	It being Four o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put, pursuant to Order [24 June].

Public Accounts

Edward Leigh: I beg to move,
	That this House takes note of the 1st to the 16th, and the 18th and 19th Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2003–04, and of the Treasury Minutes and the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel Memorandum on these Reports, Cm 6130, 6136, 6155, 6175, 6191 and 6244.
	It is a great pleasure to move a motion that stands in my name and those of the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) and the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan), who is present. I welcome Members to what could be described as part two of the Public Accounts Committee debate. We thought that February's debate was successful, and decided there should be a sequel. We hoped that splitting the debate between two afternoons would make it more topical.
	I think that PAC members will agree that the year continues to be successful for the Committee. Obviously, public sector efficiency is high on the political agenda. We have had reviews on accommodation from Sir Michael Lyons, and will shortly have one from Sir Peter Gershon on efficiency. Their efficiency agenda chimes with ours, and is always on our radar. On behalf of Parliament, we attempt to hold the Executive to account. We make recommendations for savings and improvements in public services, and we are ideally placed to report on whether the savings sought by Government have been realised.
	I want to take this opportunity not just to go through all our reports, but to explore a couple of themes. Others may wish to draw on that. The main theme is delivery of efficient and effective public services, and making them relevant to the citizen. We believe that our work over the past three years has saved upwards of £1.5 billion. Every year, 90 per cent. of the Committee's recommendations are accepted by the Government, because we eschew any party political recommendations. We think that we do hold the Government to account, but we try to do so from a positive perspective. We try to congratulate the Government when they make a success of things, and when mistakes are made we hope that our warnings will help them to ensure that those mistakes are not repeated. We hope that the good practice we identify will be heralded and shared as widely as possible in Whitehall.
	It has been a busy year for the Committee. So far we have published 26 reports, and we shall probably have published nearly 50 by the time the Session ends—far more than any other Select Committee. Our work covers almost every part of Government, from the major Whitehall Departments such as the Department of Health and the Ministry of Defence to much smaller agencies that do not normally appear on the political radar, such as the Forensic Science Service and the Veterans Agency. We could not do any of that work without the help of our able Committee staff, headed by Nick Wright, and the 800 staff of the National Audit Office, headed by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn. We pay tribute to Sir John: we could not do our work at all without his help.
	We also try to be topical. Earlier this year, we took evidence from those operating in Iraq. I shall not deal with Iraq in detail; we can return to it in our next debate when the Government have replied. Just over a week ago we had a hearing on visa entry into the United Kingdom, and tomorrow we shall consider the Home Office's work on processing asylum applications.
	There have been some changes. Sadly, we have had to lose my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne), who has become a Front-Bench spokesman. On this Committee at least, we have preserved the principle that spokesmen from the main Opposition parties should not sit on a Select Committee. I consider that an important principle. I know that it is often difficult for the Conservative party to provide people to serve on Select Committees, but I think it is important for the Public Accounts Committee—which is non-political, and is the main vehicle for scrutiny of the Government in terms of economy and efficiency—not to include Opposition spokesmen. I hope that that principle will continue to be followed. Because we hold to that principle, however, we have acquired a couple of good new members from the Conservative party: my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry). I should say that we welcome back my right hon. Friend, because he served on the Committee before the start of his distinguished ministerial career.
	At the heart of our work and hearings is our interrogation of senior Government officials. The PAC is a testing Committee, but we were rather amused to hear that one of our witnesses had paid up to £1,500 an hour to be coached on how to appear in front of it. I am pleased to say that the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), who is in his place today, immediately offered to provide on his retirement—something that we regret, because he is a very worthwhile member of our Committee—a far cheaper service to the witnesses who appear in front of us in future.
	The Committee is testing, but I make no apology for that. It is extremely important that permanent secretaries, who often live in a rarefied atmosphere, should be held to account. It is also important that key contractors to the Government should be held to account for how they have used or misused public money. At the same time, we try to be fair, to give praise where it is due and to help the Government to highlight good practice.
	We have also continued to visit the front line. For example, we had a successful visit to a drug treatment and testing order centre in Ealing in May. I hope that we can continue those visits.
	It is easy to be complacent in these debates, but I hope that we are never complacent about our Committee. I was interested to read recently in Anthony Sampson's "Who runs this place: the anatomy of Britain in the 21st century," which is an update on his earlier work:
	"Debates in the Chamber have always been a distraction from the more continuous duty of MPs: to supervise the executive over which they theoretically have sovereignty, and to call it to account—as Gladstone had told them in 1869",
	which was shortly after he founded this Committee. Mr. Sampson says:
	"The central instrument of parliament for enforcing accountability is the Public Accounts Committee"
	and I am pleased to say that he described it as
	"much the most prestigious of parliamentary committees".
	However, that is where his praise for the system ends. So that we do not become complacent, I must say that Mr. Sampson says later:
	"The effectiveness of the auditor-general depends on the Public Accounts Committee, which suffers from the same weaknesses as other select committees, with their party-political agendas and their short horizons; in any case, the PAC is no match for the complexities and obfuscations of Whitehall."
	I say that because I do not want this debate to be just a pat on the back, and I want to reply to that charge straight away. It is important not to get into the groove of party politics; we should avoid that. A book, by David Lipsey, "The Secret Treasury" makes the mild criticism of the PAC that we deal with events after they take place. However, I think that we have to do that, otherwise we would be involved in the party political process. Mr. Lipsey says that we should devote more resources to publicising our reports. We already get more press publicity than any other Select Committee, but we can and must do better. He also says that we can still look at modernising our procedures. We try to be modern and up to date, but it is important that we recognise what commentators are saying, that we are open-minded and that we constantly try to improve the way in which we do our business.
	Select Committees need to respond to what emerged from Hutton. They need to be more vigorous. They need to be prepared to test the Government more, and to call for papers that have hitherto not been in the public domain. We will do all that with the help of the National Audit Office, and it is my hope—and the hope of the right hon. Member for Swansea, West—that other Select Committees will in time gradually increase the resources available to them so that they are similar to those that we have in the Public Accounts Committee. There are things that we could do better, but we take very seriously, and are very proud of, our record in holding the Executive to account.
	Let me deal with my two themes, the first of which is service delivery and its relationship to efficiency. Everyone—from top officials to those at the coalface—needs to make the recent increases in Government spending count. Regardless of which side of the political divide members of the Committee come from, we do not take issue with the Government on whether or not these increases are right. That is not our business; rather, we are concerned with ensuring that these massive increases in public spending, particularly on health and education, actually count. They must be translated into a clear improvement in front-line services.
	During this debate, we can look at many of the reports that address this issue, so let us consider one or two. We followed up a previous National Audit Office inquiry into the medical assessment of incapacity and disability benefits. We found that, as result of our recommendations being implemented, the average time taken to process medical examinations had fallen by seven weeks, so that is an example of a delivery gain actually being achieved. Recipients of incapacity and disability benefits now get a decision more quickly on the benefits that they need and to which they are properly entitled. I should add, however, that such improvement in service is entirely compatible with making efficiency gains. By reducing significantly the backlog of delays in making decisions about benefits, the Department has saved the taxpayer £29 million. The improvements, if sustained, will lead to future savings of some £21 million each year, so that, too, is a gain.
	Improvements in public services are not just about what the customer gets at the end of the process, be it a benefit payment or a new passport; the actual experience of dealing with government is also important. Our 26th report, on difficult forms—it was published this morning—makes a number of recommendations that will hopefully help to reduce the burden of bureaucracy on the citizen. Forms need to be shorter and easier to complete, and people should not have to provide the same information to several Government Departments, let alone several times to the same Department. Forms might sound a boring subject and perhaps it is; but it would add enormously to the happiness of many people if forms were short, and easy to fill in and to understand.
	So I emphasise again that better services and efficiency improvements can be two sides of the same coin. At the same time as improving the experience of the customer, Departments can reduce their own administrative costs and therefore do more for the public. For example, the Inland Revenue's introduction of the short tax return for some customers should result in more efficient processing. It is a shame, however, that the Revenue does not yet know the relative costs of processing the short form and the standard one. Perhaps bureaucracies have a rule whereby all forms, however long or short, take the same time to process—I do not know.
	I am afraid to say that the claim by some public bodies to place the consumer at the heart of their work is somewhat exaggerated. As our report "Helping consumers benefit from competition in telecommunications" shows, customers are still not getting as good a deal as they could on their telephone bills. Twenty years after the telephone market was liberalised, British Telecom still has a staggering 70 per cent. of the market. Customers could save money by switching supplier or changing their tariff.
	When we published the report, some apologists for BT had a go at the Committee, but I make no apology for standing up for the customer and the consumer in this instance—or, indeed, in all instances. The truth is that people find the telecommunications market confusing. We found that Oftel was remote from consumers. It did not do enough to help them to make properly informed choices, and it spent only a tiny fraction of its budget on publicity. Its successor, Ofcom, must now disseminate guidance on how to identify the best supplier, and do more to draw public attention to the savings available by switching supplier.
	Two of our more recent reports looked specifically at agencies' efforts to improve their service delivery. Our fourth report was about the Forensic Science Service. The service's direct customers are the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and Customs and its work is increasingly important. Any delay in forensic analysis can mean suspects being bailed, charges being dropped and court cases being jeopardised, but the timeliness of the agency's performance is very disappointing. It has missed targets every year since the Committee last looked into the subject. DNA samples, for example, were waiting on the shelf for two weeks before being analysed, even though the analysis takes less than a day and a half. The agency must turn around its performance and maximise the use and efficiency of its laboratories.
	Our 20th report looked at the Veterans Agency and was published shortly before the nation commemorated D-day. We found that, by and large, veterans were receiving the service to which they were entitled, but in some areas the agency can and should do a lot better. For example, we found that the targets placed on the agency were undemanding and we were particularly concerned that new claims for war disablement pensions took a staggering 131 days to complete—more than four months and well in excess of the agency's own target. Surely veterans who have suffered injury on behalf of their country deserve a better service than that.
	I was particularly concerned about the treatment of Gurkhas. I received a letter from the Minister this week, emphasising that Gurkhas would be eligible to receive pensions under the war pensions scheme, so I believe that we have made some progress.
	No Public Accounts Committee debate is complete without someone talking about information technology disasters. In the last debate, I noted that Libra, the national IT project for magistrates courts, was the latest in a long list of public IT disasters. Sadly, in our 14th report on the Inland Revenue's new tax credit system, we had yet another sorry tale to tell. The introduction of the new system was nothing short of disastrous for public service. Hundreds of thousands of claimants were not paid on time, which led to hardship among some of the most vulnerable people in society. Inconvenience was created for employers and employees, and other aspects of the Revenue's business were disrupted. The accounting officer, Sir Nicholas Montague, admitted that public confidence in the Revenue had been severely dented.
	I believe that IT systems need to work effectively to serve the public properly, but we also need to ensure that we avoid wasted public spending. In fact, considerable sums could be saved. Under the old tax credit system, the Revenue was making overpayments that could total as much as a staggering £700 million a year. In that case, roll-out happened, even though people knew that the pilot studies were inadequate.

David Taylor: I congratulate the hon. Gentleman and various members of the Committee over the years on their IT reports, in which I have taken considerable interest. Is the hon. Gentleman surprised that, in the face of all the evidence of failing large-scale public sector IT projects, large Government Departments such as Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are still wedded to the idea that outsourcing is necessarily the best way to obtain IT facilities? Does he believe that Departments should draw more heavily on the recommendations of his reports and those of previous Committee Chairmen?

Edward Leigh: I very much hope that they do draw heavily on our recommendations, of which there are many. Clearly, IT is one of the most difficult areas for the Government. To be fair to them, the systems that they have to deal with are far more complex and much larger than those in the private sector. We have to accept that. However, lessons are sometimes not learned, and the Government often try to bite off more than they can chew. Often, new Ministers arrive on the scene and load new policies and new burdens on to IT systems that simply cannot cope with them. Frankly, those lessons have to be learned and the Government have to be more conservative and more cautious in dealing with IT in the future.

Gerry Steinberg: Although it does not relate to the reports in the list, one big failure from many months ago that has still not been put right—it is about time that it was—concerns the Child Support Agency IT system. There are two separate systems operating—one for people who came into the system at an earlier stage and another for more recent entrants. Frankly, the lack of progress made there is quite outrageous. Different rates of maintenance apply to people in basically similar conditions and no progress at all seems to have been made. It is another failure of IT, and perhaps one day we could get round to doing something about it.

Edward Leigh: I hope that we do. As the hon. Gentleman says, that is not the subject of any of the reports being discussed this afternoon, but the CSA's IT system is of enormous importance. It has been one of the greatest disasters in the public delivery of services over the past 15 years, and I hope that the National Audit Office will look into it again so that we can make further recommendations.
	I shall digress for a moment to discuss the subject of fraud, a topic with which we are always concerned. In our third report, we examine the payment of EU support to sheep farmers in Northern Ireland. I should say that we are now the PAC for Northern Ireland as well, as Stormont, of course, is suspended. We found a catalogue of errors and control failures in the payment of some £24 million a year in subsidy that pointed to a particularly slack regime. I can also tell the House that that hearing was notably strong.
	Key requirements of the scheme had been repeatedly ignored. The Department involved had consistently neglected the interests of taxpayers over a long period, and that had contributed to unacceptably high levels of fraud. For example, we found evidence of payments for sheep that were either figments of the fraudsters' imagination, or which had died some time earlier. There was evidence that some departmental staff were complicit in allowing farmers to claim more money than they were properly due.
	The accounting officer has assured us that his department now operates a policy of "zero tolerance"—his words—in respect of fraud, and that attempts to cheat the system are being tackled much more vigorously. We look to progress.

Ian Davidson: Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that the fact that some of the sheep were dead when they were counted did not necessarily prevent them from voting in the recent European elections?

Edward Leigh: Perhaps we should not delve too deeply into the intricacies of electoral politics in Northern Ireland. However, we are all finding our experience of being the PAC for Northern Ireland very illuminating.
	I have spoken about service delivery, and I want to devote the second part of my remarks to a brief discussion of better project management and procurement, which is a key part of our work. To avoid the problems encountered with the introduction of the new tax credit, the Government must get their act together on project management. Improvements in that and in procurement—where we are starting to see some notable successes—could save the taxpayer millions of pounds, and would free resources for public services.
	I believe that the Committee has a valuable role to play in encouraging improved project management across Government, and that we boast first-class credentials. In recent years, we have published more than 30 reports on private finance initiative deals alone. That is a controversial subject, about which people have strong views. I hope that our reports have got down to the nitty-gritty of PFI, and have shown whether its use in individual cases stands up.

David Taylor: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. Earlier, he said that the PAC commented not on the ends of policies but on the means by which they were delivered, and the efficiency of that delivery. Does the hon. Gentleman consider the PFI to be a means to Government ends, or to be the end of Government? I am of the latter opinion, as the medium and long-term impact of PFI cannot be justified, either in terms of finance or in respect of the services with which it is associated.

Edward Leigh: Recently, we held an interesting seminar with senior Treasury officials. The members of the Committee sought assurances from Government that every case of procurement would be looked at on its merits. There should not be an assumption that we must go down the PFI route for ideological or political reasons. Sometimes, traditional or conventional means of procurement can be better, and provide better value for money, than the PFI route. Equally, however, the Committee is not prepared to say that PFI is wrong for political or ideological reasons. We recognise that, in some cases, it has delivered schools and hospitals on budget and to time.
	In general, we are prepared to look at every PFI project on its merits. I do not think that we can do anything else, but I know that the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) takes an interest in these matters and I assure him that we will continue to keep a beady eye on the subject. We shall not allow any Government to proceed down the PFI route merely because they feel that they must. For instance, we looked at the new GCHQ building, which was a PFI project. The new building was built under a PFI deal, while GCHQ retained responsibility for moving its technology into it, largely for security reasons of course. However, over two years GCHQ's cost estimates for that element rocketed from £41 million to £450 million.
	A number of lessons can be learned from that report that are pertinent to other Departments. GCHQ failed to spot that the development of IT networking during the 1990s would hugely complicate the moving of its technology. It also continued for far too long to perceive the matter as a building project rather than a major change programme. The taxpayer lost £400 million as a result.

Brian Jenkins: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will recall that in the case of GCHQ it was not the PFI project—the building itself—that was over cost and over time, but the moving of the equipment. Serious doubts remain in my mind about whether GCHQ took the opportunity to update the equipment on the back of the move.

Edward Leigh: Well, GCHQ had to update its equipment. It is not giving away national secrets to say that it is obvious that there have been massive advances in information technology that have had a huge impact on the work of GCHQ. The sheer cost of installing the new computer systems in that superb new building was, unfortunately, underestimated. I hope that lessons have now been learned. Incidentally, our hearing on an acutely sensitive matter of national security was an object lesson in how Members of Parliament can concentrate on the lessons to be learned without compromising that security. I hope that we can make further progress on such matters in other areas, because the public spotlight should fall on GCHQ as much as on any other part of Government.
	The new Home Office building in Marsham street should be an object lesson in the need for Departments to think carefully about their real requirements. Our 18th report found that the new Home Office building was planned on the basis that numbers of Home Office staff in London would fall. In fact, the numbers have increased and by the time the report was signed, the Home Office and Prison Service staff numbers were 1,500 in excess of the capacity of the new building. The Home Office is considering accommodation options. I hope that it will take seriously our recommendation that it should consider moving more staff out of London. It may be an inevitable rule of bureaucracy that a new building for a Department will never be large enough. In any case, the planning should have been better.
	I pat the Government on the back for a positive example of procurement that they mostly got right. Our 10th report examined the success of the Office of Government Commerce negotiation of the memorandum of understanding with software companies. It sounds an obscure subject, but the Government saved £600 million of public money. The new arrangements have already saved the taxpayer £50 million, and it is important that the OGC keeps up that momentum. I pay tribute to Sir Peter Gershon, who has now left Government service, for his work and the considerable savings that he achieved of £1.6 billion in Government procurement. It just shows what can be done.
	The Committee has produced many other reports that hon. Members can discuss. For instance, we had hearings on Warm Front, and we found that the targets were so weak that they could be met simply by installing a couple of light bulbs.

Brian Jenkins: The Chairman will be aware that the report on the memorandum by the OGC said that 10 per cent. of Departments are still without an up-to-date IT list and were unaware of the memorandum. I know that that means that 90 per cent. were aware of it, but we are interested in the 10 per cent. and improving that figure.

Edward Leigh: I am sure that Sir Peter Gershon's successor, John Oughton, will continue to make enormous savings. There is no point in excellent recommendations being made if they are not followed through, and perhaps the Minister will address that point when she winds up. Some Government Departments appear to be able to evade their responsibilities, but we look to progress.
	I was briefly running through a list of other subjects where targets are weak. I mentioned Warm Front. The saga of the Wembley stadium is well known so I shall not go into details. Our report on hip replacements found that there was a dangerous tendency for too few operations to be performed by consultants. We also looked at the performance of secondary schools.
	I mention those subjects to show the enormous breadth of our work. It is a great privilege for all members of the Committee to deal with it and to try to make sense of it and, with the help of the National AuditOffice, to make sensible conclusions and recommendations.
	I conclude on the same theme with which I closed my speech during our last debate—making increased investment in public services count. I make no apology for returning to that, as it is a central issue for the Government. In April, we held a hearing on the capacity of Departments to spend the £61 billion increase in resources. Not surprisingly, we focused on health, education and transport and discussed five key risks that need careful attention. Unnecessary complexity in bureaucracy must be removed from the delivery chain; delivery organisations must have enough capacity; resources must be targeted where they are really needed; risks to delivery must be identified and managed; and performance must be properly monitored and evaluated.
	Unsurprisingly, the permanent secretaries—distinguished gentlemen in charge of health, education and transport—agreed with the Committee. Perhaps that is blindingly obvious. But again and again we came across instances where one or more of those key factors had been left out. That is when the public can suffer, so we must continue to make our voice heard.
	We shall continue to scrutinise the efficiency with which Departments and other bodies spend our money, and the improvements, or failings, in the services that they provide us and our constituents. It is clear to members of the Committee that many lessons can be learned and we hope and believe that our reports will be high on the reading list of officials. In the Committee, we shall work together in a spirit of bipartisan consensus, not going for the lowest common denominator but producing hard-hitting reports that hold the Government to account in delivering better public services for all our citizens.

Gerry Steinberg: As the Chairman of the PAC said, this is our second debate this Session and I reiterate everything I said in my last speech on the subject a few months ago, especially relating to the National Audit Office, the PAC staff and the Chairman himself. I thanked everybody and congratulated them on their performance. Members will have listened so carefully to my speech that they will of course be able to remember what I said and it will be clear in their minds, so there is no reason to repeat it. I shall not go into great detail, but repeat my thanks to everyone for their work since our last debate.
	It shows how much I enjoy the work of the Committee that, this afternoon, I could have been at the centre court at Wimbledon—watching, not playing. However, I declined the invitation as I felt that it was important to participate in the debate.
	The Chairman has gone through almost all the reports and has explained the role of the PAC, so I shall not repeat that. We consider about 50 reports a year and he gave an excellent picture of our work. I want to concentrate on two reports.
	Each report that we consider has a bearing on our constituents' lives—some have more of a bearing than others. Very often, our constituency postbags include letters from constituents who, frankly, have been given a very bad deal by Departments. In particular, we often receive very harrowing letters about decisions that have been taken with regard to social security benefits and the consequent appeals, as the Chairman of the PAC mentioned in his excellent speech. Very often, that is linked to stories about how people have been treated in the medical assessment procedures according to which their incapacity and disability benefits are determined. So we recently investigated those issues and produced two reports called, "Getting it right, putting it right: Improved decision-making in appeals in social security benefits" and "Progress in improving the medical assessment of incapacity and disability benefits." Those reports were vital to many of my constituents and demonstrate that, frankly, if such things are not done fairly and correctly, a huge amount of misery can be caused to people's lives.
	Millions of those benefit decisions are taken each year, and many are very complex. Most people accept the decisions that are made, but others appeal, as they have every right to do. In 1999, the appeals system changed owing to the concerns that were expressed in Parliament. In fact, since then, the number of appeals has reduced by 15 to 20 per cent. and waiting times for appeals has also reduced; but, unfortunately, we found no proof that the standard of decision making has improved. At least 20 per cent. of those decisions still contain serious errors, and 45 per cent of the decisions that relate to attendance allowance and disability living allowance are incorrect. That is not a very good story, particularly for the people about whom wrong decisions are made. Incidentally, 38 per cent. of income support decisions were incorrect in 2002—the last year that those cases were looked at. Decisions that relate to medically assessed benefits have the highest rate of overturn on appeal.
	The 1999 reforms abolished the role of the chief adjudication officer and transferred responsibility for decision standards to the Department's agency chief executives. At the time, that was a very controversial decision. Under the new rules, the Secretary of State is now required to report to Parliament on performance in benefit decision making, yet the first two reports in 2001 and 2002 were both published about 15 months late and the exercise cost the taxpayer £62 million. So there is still room for much improvement.
	Disability living allowance is a self-assessed benefit, but the decision maker can seek medical evidence from other sources, which may include a medical examination. The claim form is 47 pages long and is undoubtedly onerous to complete. Obviously, we found that it needs simplifying. Some 90,000 cases—one in 12—go to appeal, which is not surprising given the methods involved, and 50 per cent. of them are found in favour of the appellant. Since the 1999 reforms, the number of appeals has risen—obviously, more mistakes are being made.
	The Department's officials do not see the client face to face when they make their initial decision and the decision letters sent out are often confusing and unhelpful. Again, that needs rectifying. There are very large variations—about an eight times difference between the best and the worst—in the time taken by Jobcentre Plus districts to prepare appeal submissions. Appellants may attend the hearings and meetings, and the evidence shows that people are more likely to receive a favourable outcome if they are present face to face. The figures show that 61 per cent. of people who turn up win their cases, while only 34 per cent. of those who do not turn up win. However, people are not told that it is better for them to attend the appeal meeting, so that problem should be put right.

Angela Browning: The hon. Gentleman is right. Does he agree that we lack an advocacy service for people who attend appeals? Individuals often need people to attend such meetings with them and although the citizens advice bureau and other voluntary organisations can offer a degree of advocacy to assist with such cases, we simply do not have sufficient advocacy services throughout the country.

Gerry Steinberg: I agree with the hon. Lady. People have the right to take a third party to such meetings, but many people who make appeals are not told that. As she says, it is sometimes difficult for people to find individuals to accompany them. I have often been asked to represent people at appeals, but that is difficult if one does not know the case personally and must get time off to attend.
	It is unacceptable for people to have to wait 90 days for a hearing given that they have probably waited about 10 weeks to reach that stage in the first place. As I said, people are not told that their appeal is more likely to be successful if they attend the hearing.
	We found several examples of people not pursuing an appeal because the process was too distressing and demanding. I am greatly worried that often only people who are sufficiently articulate make successful cases, which means that the process has little to do with the validity of cases and more to do with an appellant's ability to construct and present an argument. I know of two cases in my constituency, and I am sure that many hon. Members are aware of similar examples, which showed me that people who were persistent and able to construct an articulate case were more likely to be awarded a benefit than those who are less articulate. On the face of it, such people might be more worthy of winning their cases, despite the fact that they are less orally gifted.
	For example, I knew of a highly intelligent individual with an undoubted ability to present an argument who was successfully awarded incapacity benefit following an appeal. I am not suggesting that that decision was not right, but saying that the appeal was successful and that he was articulate. On the other hand, I met a cleaner in a community centre who was unable to move or lift tables and chairs after she had had a colostomy reversal, but whose appeal was turned down. Again, I am not making accusations, but it seemed peculiar that the person who was articulate made a successful appeal while the cleaner who was in tremendous difficulty did not.
	I turn to the second part of the report regarding progress made on improving the medical assessment for incapacity and disability benefits. Those benefits cost the taxpayer about £18 billion a year, so we must get things right. Apart from that, however, people should get the benefits to which they are entitled. Part of the test for eligibility is a medical assessment, and although claimants' doctors provide some evidence, more than 1 million medical reports are produced each year by Schlumberger medical services, which holds the contract for medical appeals. The situation worries me greatly because it is clear that the quality of the service provided to claimants by the company's doctors varies greatly.

David Taylor: Like me, my hon. Friend might well have had contact with Schlumberger Sema regarding miners' compensation and its performance can be patchy. Will he comment on its recent performance when dealing with people with mental health problems? Such people find it especially difficult to get a fair deal and to obtain the right decisions at medical appeal tribunals. Is he happy that the company's doctors are appropriately trained to deal with such cases?

Gerry Steinberg: No. One of the complaints by citizens advice bureaux concerns the standard of doctors' assessment of people with mental illness, and it gave us some shocking examples in which such people were failed. Our report makes some recommendations, so I suggest that my hon. Friend read it.
	Citizens advice bureaux, which are involved with the claims process, report that across the country personal capacity assessments are throwing up a large number of benefit withdrawals, despite fact, as detailed in the PAC's previous report, that the Department for Work and Pensions is establishing more rigorous targets for the quality of Schlumberger's medical reports. Although the proportion of reports rated substandard has halved from 6 per cent. to 3 per cent., that is still a huge number of mistakes affecting 30,000 cases. Schlumberger doctors underestimate miserably the severity of claimants' disability. Citizens advice bureaux have dealt with scores of such cases, most of which arise because examining medical practitioners employed by Schlumberger fail to provide a correct PCA score to decision makers in the Department for Work and Pensions. For example, a man in the east midlands with cervical spondylosis and heart disease who had received incapacity benefit for 10 years was exempted from the PCA on the ground of severe illness in 2000, but not in 2004, even though his condition had deteriorated. The examining medical practitioner awarded him only six points—15 is the threshold—even though the client disagreed with five of the zero scores, and his GP and consultant said that he must not work.
	In the west midlands, a man with severe heart disease was told by his GP that he should not work, but the examining medical practitioner thought otherwise and decided that he had failed the PCA. He did not start work again, but he had a heart attack five months later and needed a coronary artery bypass, suggesting that his GP was right and the Schlumberger doctor wrong. A man in the north-west with severe arthritis in all his joints who had received incapacity benefit for 10 years was not awarded any points at his medical examination, which lasted 10 minutes.
	Such cases must be looked at so that tests are done properly in future. One questions whether the EMPs are merely going through the motions in an assessment or are genuinely concerned about the people whom they assess. It is a great concern that the withdrawal of incapacity benefit, which may have been someone's only income for many years, may result from a short, sloppy examination by a Schlumberger doctor. We were told that 22 doctors have been sacked and 40 have been told to improve, which is a poor record. The report shows that it is not just Schlumberger doctors who need to improve—many GPs are reluctant to complete medical reports for their patients because it may harm the patient-doctor relationship. I find that a weak excuse. Perhaps they do not like filling in forms or having their normal procedures disturbed. I have regularly found that to be the case with some GPs.
	When an individual fails the personal capability assessment, incapacity benefit stops immediately and there are knock-on effects: income support stops because the person is expected to claim jobseeker's allowance, having been declared fit to work. Housing benefit and other benefits may stop. The individual can do one of two things—appeal and claim jobseeker's allowance, or claim 80 per cent. of income support until the appeal is resolved and reapply for housing benefit and the other benefits. That can all be traumatic. People's income could drop to as little as £44 a week. For those under 25, it could drop to less than £35 a week. That causes stress and could endanger health, so benefits should be stopped only on sound evidence, not on the basis of sloppy findings by a doctor who may just want to get the case out of the way.
	We found that there were administration problems with the Schlumberger doctors. When that happens, the stress and the inconvenience caused to disabled people can be worse than one imagines. In many cases the effect is made more serious by benefits being stopped as a result of an unjustified decision. I shall give examples. The client of a London citizens advice bureau informed Schlumberger that he would be unable to attend a PCA examination and his invalidity benefit was stopped. The problem was compounded because although the Department for Work and Pensions agreed that the invalidity benefit should be reinstated, the computer system went wrong and he never received it. Such administrative errors are not at all helpful.
	A citizens advice bureau in East Anglia reported that a young man with severe learning difficulties and behavioural problems missed two appointments for his assessment, the first time because he was ill, and the second time because his mother was too ill to take him and he needed to be accompanied. Each time his mother had informed the medical centre of the reason and was told that it was okay. What happened? His invalidity benefit and income support were stopped and he had to apply for a crisis loan for food. That is not good enough. The administration must be better than that.
	Most medical examinations relating to disability living allowance and attendance allowance are carried out at clients' homes by doctors who are not employees of Schlumberger, but have jobs elsewhere as GPs. They often try to fit their medicals outside their working hours, which can result in phone calls to clients inappropriately late at night or early in the morning, and requests that can appear to be demands to carry out medicals at weekends or in the evenings. For example, an 80-year-old asthmatic man received a phone call at 7 pm on a Saturday to say that the doctor would call at 8 am the following day—Sunday—to examine him in his own home. He found it difficult to be up and dressed by 8 am, he was distressed when he was asked to go up and down the stairs several times, but he was afraid to tell the doctor that the time proposed was inconvenient. That is no way to do business, is it?
	Also in the south-east, a mentally ill woman was telephoned at 7.20 am by a Schlumberger doctor who wanted to conduct a medical the same evening. The client was naturally confused and distressed by the call. That cannot be fair on the patient, who made an appeal. As far as I am concerned, such GPs are moonlighting. The conduct is not appropriate and needs rectifying.
	Notwithstanding all the problems, improvements have been made, but the Government still have a long way to go. I am confident that the two reports that we produced on these matters will lead to further improvements and will consequently give a better deal to people who, unfortunately, have to apply for benefits.

Richard Allan: Unlike the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), I have not refused Wimbledon tickets, but I like to think that I, like him, would choose Westminster over Wimbledon this afternoon.
	This is the second occasion on which I have participated in the debate on Public Accounts Committee reports. I became a member of the Committee last autumn and am still enjoying the experience, although it can be challenging. I found it particularly tough to get my head around resource accounting, my momentary understanding of which disappears as soon as I leave Committee Room 15 or 16, where the Committee meets. I pay tribute to staff from the Committee, the National Audit Office and the Treasury, who try hard to help us understand concepts such as private finance initiatives and resource accounting.
	I joined the Committee because I am interested in information technology. Sadly, I have not been disappointed, because IT failures are a recurrent theme in our deliberations. Rather than discussing IT failures, however, I want to remark on two forward-looking technology reports and the Government's responses to them. The 10th report "Purchasing and managing software licences" and the 11th report "Helping consumers benefit from competition in telecommunications" examine how we can improve things rather than what went wrong in the past. The 10th report is important for the Government, and the 11th report is important for consumers.
	The 10th report seeks to secure better value from Government investment, which, as our Chairman rightly mentioned, is a key theme in Committee. In the software arena, better value could be obtained in three ways. First, prices from existing suppliers could be driven down through mechanisms such as the memorandum referred to in the report. Secondly, new ways to license software—specifically those offered by open-source software—could be explored. The third option, which is not a feature of the report but is important, is software asset management, which involves knowing what software one has and whether it is being used correctly.
	Those three options interrelate to a significant degree. I have no doubt that the pricing of commodity software, which is covered by the memorandum, has been affected by the growing success of open-source software, which offers a genuine route to competition. Until recently, no significant competitor offered desktop software, but competition is increasing and is affecting prices directly. Multi-million pound savings have already been credited to the memorandum, and the credit for that should go to thousands of friendly hackers, who have produced open-source software alternatives that provide real competition for some of the established players.
	Credit is especially due to Richard Stallman, who is the philosopher of the free software movement and the author of the general public licence, which is also known as the copyleft licence rather than the copyright licence, and which has been critical in developing competition. The participation of thousands of people around the globe in such work has resulted in significant savings to the public purse.
	The alternative licensing model for free software is described as "free as in speech, rather than free as in beer", which is American shorthand to describe a completely different approach to software production. The Government response refers to their open-source software strategy, which will be updated in the autumn, and I hope that the public sector takes an increased interest in that software development model as a result of that review.

Brian Jenkins: When I asked a question about that matter in 2002, the Minister said that a level playing field for open-source software had been achieved, but the pilot survey has still not been completed.

Richard Allan: The hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. I am lobbied weekly by people who are keen to promote greater use of that form of software in the public sector but find that there are still barriers to it. There are also questions about the nature of the pilots, which tend to involve large companies instead of the smaller companies engaged in this field. We need to keep our eye on this very technical area.
	The changes have borne fruit in the shape of £50 million in savings. If we trace that back to where it came from, we can see that it results from competition starting to emerge in a market that was previously locked down and uncompetitive. We should do everything we can to encourage that trend. Relevant to that are some important technical decisions concerning intellectual property legislation in relation to patent law and copyright law at the European Union level. Many in the sector fear that established players will use legal methods to shut out competitors and to stifle competition before it arrives by making it dependent on expensive licensing legislation. I hope that the Government will follow through the report by saying, "We are making these savings, and we could make more if we took an enlightened approach to intellectual property legislation that encouraged, rather than discouraged, a competitive market." There is plenty of action on that front, especially at EU level.
	All these methods of getting more software more cheaply are useful, but I hope that they will be complemented by effective software asset management systems to ensure that we are not buying too much software. There is a fear that the mechanism could be counterproductive. If it is cheap for an organisation with 5,000 employees to buy a mass of 5,000 licences, it may be encouraged to do so, but if only 3,500 of those employees have a use for that software, the remaining 1,500 licences, although bought more cheaply, represent money down the drain. The most simple waste of all, which occurs on a weekly basis in the public sector as it does elsewhere, is to pay good money to upgrade a software product that has not even been deployed for use. I hope that we will be able to balance our pleasure at being able to buy more software more cheaply against maintaining a rigorous approach towards ensuring that we buy only what we need in the public sector.
	The other report that I want to consider is the 11th report on telecommunications. My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel), who served on the Public Accounts Committee in relation to that report, made a suggestion that I promised to pass on. He believes that fixed line telephone providers could help consumers to work through the mass of call bundles that are on offer—that was one of the themes that came out of the report—by ensuring that once their call patterns have been established they are offered the most appropriate call plan. Instead of the consumer having to figure out which call plan is right, often getting it wrong and being frustrated to be told that they could have got it cheaper if only they had ticked box A instead of box B, we should encourage the telecoms companies to take some of that responsibility. That is what happened in the highly competitive mobile sphere when mobile operators responded to competition by giving commitments always to go for the lowest-priced bundle for any particular user. I hope that that idea will be considered.
	So far, the verdict of Ofcom, the critical player, is that companies are doing a reasonable job, but much of the report is directed towards trying to give it a steer as to how the Committee think that the competitive market can be developed. The art is to try to maintain a balance in the debate, which is taking place against a background of commercial companies fighting desperately for business. As the largest incumbent provider, BT—naturally for a business—is trying to fight off new entrants into the market. Given that most of our constituents are still BT customers, the quickest benefit for most of them usually comes from improvements to its packages for consumers. When BT announces changes to the "Together" packages or line rental, it frequently does so with a fanfare about how good they are to consumers. It is true that in the short term—today, tomorrow and next month—BT improvements are often the best way to get cheaper telecoms out to the largest number of people. However, that may make life difficult for competitors such as carrier pre-select operators, so the long-term effect is to act against competition. We need to try to strike a balance. We should not be too churlish about the goodies that are offered today, but at the same time we should not allow them to discourage us from seeking a longer-term competitive market. Ofcom has to try to hold the ring in all this.
	We will know where Ofcom is going when we see the outcome of the telecoms review later in the year. We have encouraged people to go out and sell alternative telecoms packages more forcefully, but I agree with BT when it says that rogue operators often take that too far and sign up people without their consent. Events in the gas and electricity markets are already being echoed in the telecoms market. I am sure that constituents have approached hon. Members who are present to say that their suppliers have been switched but that they did not believe that they had consented to that. We must be firm and emphasise that we do not want to encourage inappropriate sales techniques and that we expect Ofcom to tackle that.
	However, I am also in sympathy with alternative operators who say that it is extremely hard to describe the market as a level playing field when one operator can change at a stroke the rules of the game for everybody and introduce, for example, line rental charge changes. That alters the business model for carrier pre-select operators in a way that requires more long-term consultation and consideration. Such changes should not be thrown into the market, thus allowing people simply to sink or swim.
	As always with Public Accounts Committee debates, there is plenty more to say. I shall confine myself to a final point about the tax credit system, which, again, could be the subject of a huge debate. However, I want to highlight one aspect. The technical problem with the implementation of the tax credit system is that the testing time scale was shortened so that all the tests that should have been undertaken were not carried out. When we questioned witnesses, we were told that there was an information tree. The supplier, Electronic Data Systems, told officials in the Inland Revenue that it would have to shorten the time scale for testing. It said that it thought that that would all right but that some inherent risk was entailed. It claimed that there would be no difficulty at any stage in warning people all the way up to the top—ministerial level—that problems might occur. That is an unsatisfactory method of decision making.
	The solution—if one exists—to avoiding the tax credit problem would have been to take a serious political decision to delay the implementation of the system on the basis of insufficient testing. That may have been a better alternative to the method that was chosen: to go ahead without the testing. I was not satisfied that sufficient political courage existed to make such decisions.
	The Child Support Agency system has already been mentioned. Again, all sorts of delays and problems have occurred with it and it is perceived that politicians declare that they will set up a system on a specific date and, when technical problems arise, there is insufficient willingness to admit that, although they want to deliver it, they cannot because of those problems. We therefore go ahead and end up with a cocked-up, discredited system. We all have constituents whose attitude to tax credits, and consequently the operation of the Inland Revenue, is negative.
	I raised a tax credit query on behalf of a constituent last week. The fax from the office that deals with such queries from Members of Parliament had a space for printing a header. It stated "War room", which is perhaps not entirely suitable to be passed on to a constituent, but sums up the feeling of Inland Revenue staff that they are engaged in some sort of conflict, fending off hordes of angry Members of Parliament, who are dealing with distraught constituents. Unresolved issues about the decision-making process remain and I am sure that that applies to other matters.
	The reports are useful. My time on the Public Accounts Committee has been most well spent and I commend the reports to the House.

Alan Williams: I apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee for being slightly late. As the Chairman knows, I had a meeting with the Comptroller and Auditor General preparatory to next week's Public Accounts Commission meeting to consider the corporate plan.
	It is not generally realised that the National Audit Office is monitored as it monitors others. When we consider the list of reports on the Order Paper, I am not sure how many people realise that, on average, those value-for-money reports cost £180,000 each. The collective year's output probably costs approximately £9 million. That accounts for only a small part of the NAO's public work in auditing all the Departments. It has been argued for many years that it saves the taxpayer money because it makes eightfold savings on every public pound that it spends.
	That argument had become rather axiomatic, however, and we had not challenged it. A year ago, therefore, the Commission decided to ask for an audit of the National Audit Office. Haines Watts carried it out for us, and the report arrived on my desk the other day. It confirmed what the NAO has always claimed—this was after consultation with Departments that had been studied by the NAO—which was that it did indeed save eight times its annual cost. I can think of no other organisation that can make such a claim. In fact, its efficiency is improving. Up to 1998, it saved only seven times its annual cost, so it has now improved on what was even then a remarkably good performance. The Commission now intends to ensure that we monitor annually the rate of return from the work of the NAO.
	Hon. Members can see the number of reports that we have produced already this year. In the past, we have produced only 50 reports a year, so, with £650 million worth of public expenditure and income, we can only ever look at a minuscule proportion of the total. It seemed to me that, with such a good rate of return from the NAO, it would be a good investment to have more reports. For this year, therefore, my Commission has authorised an extra 10 reports. This has an advantage for the Committee, in that we do not always want to monitor those who have gone wrong; sometimes we want to monitor those who have done well and pat heads when they deserve to be patted. The extra reports will allow the Committee to have some choice over which 50 reports it will hold hearings on in the current year.
	I do not pretend that we have any concept of what the optimum output of the NAO would be. With the rates of return that I have mentioned, we must ask whether even further investment might be practicable. That, however, places a further problem before the Public Accounts Committee. The more we expand the output of reports from the NAO, the more difficult it would become for us to monitor all of them and, some time in the next year or two, we might have to consider the way in which the Committee works. We have already had brief discussions about that.
	Like all members of the Committee, I sometimes get very annoyed when I meet obstruction from the Departments that are being examined, and I have been particularly annoyed this year, as have other members of the Committee, about one issue. We were promised a report on the royal finances from the NAO, and a draft was put to the Committee. Its members were not satisfied that it was comprehensive, so we submitted extra questions. I myself submitted two pages, containing 20 to 30 supplementary questions. That was months ago, yet we still have not had answers to those questions from the Palace.
	As some hon. Members will know, I have shown a modest interest in Palace finances over the past 12 to 15 years, so foot-dragging is not exactly unknown to me. I am amazed, however, that the Palace is treating the Public Accounts Committee with such contempt, and I hope that it will quickly make the information available to the NAO, to enable it to prepare its report. There are areas that we never look at; we are not allowed to, although we should be. The royal collection, for example, which is probably the largest single collection in the country in terms of value, is so organised—no doubt by coincidence—that the National Audit Office cannot examine it. It is organised as a charitable trust, and the NAO cannot examine charities, and its commercial wing is the Royal Collection Trust, and we have had trouble, up until Sharman, getting powers for the NAO to examine companies. It is an enormous collection, of which there is no catalogue—we were promised one 10 years ago by Sir Michael Peat, and it still does not exist. Only yesterday, I received an answer from the Financial Secretary confirming that at least she is satisfied that there is an inventory of the collection. If there is an inventory, it is a short step to producing a catalogue and making that available to the public as so many museums do. In the next couple of months, I hope that we will have the information that we require from the palace.
	It is no secret that I am probably devolution's most consistent enemy in the House of Commons. I must confess, however, that I have found one merit in it. The breaking down of the auditing function between the constituent countries has increased the access of auditors to the working of Departments. Therefore, as my colleagues know, I hope that the next stage for us will be to start working co-operatively as auditing and monitoring bodies, and to produce comparative reports where appropriate. Health is an obvious example. I asked Sir John, and I think that there will be a report in the next month or two, to carry out a comparative study of hospital waiting lists in relation to hip and cataract operations. If different systems are in operation, we might as well ensure that we not only look for what is wrong but for what is best, and that we analyse the different systems, the way in which they work, and the products that they provide to the consumer. Where one part of the country has a good idea, that can be used by other parts, and where one part of the country is dragging its feet, as Wales is currently doing on health, that can be exposed.
	I have nothing more to say other than to thank my colleagues. I am a PAC addict—I have been on it so long that I cannot leave it. It is so good to see new members coming on to the Committee, despite its work being difficult, numerate and time-consuming. Each report is about 70 pages, as we all know, and there is all the supplementary briefing, so when doing two of those a week, Members are probably putting in more work than on any other Committee. I congratulate my younger, newer colleagues—everyone is younger nowadays—on the enthusiasm and thoroughness with which they carried out this year's work.

Richard Bacon: It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams)—a doughty member of the Committee from whom I have learned a great deal in my three years on it. He mentioned the royal family, and the evidence shows that the Committee's scrutiny of the royal family has been very useful. I remember the report on royal travel by air and rail, which had the wonderful performance indicator, "cost per royal mile". Costs fell from £17 million to £5 million, and the amount of travel stayed the same by rail and doubled, I seem to remember, by air.   
	As ever, I pay tribute to the National Audit Office and to the team led by Sir John Bourn, and also to our Committee staff, led by Nick Wright and the Committee assistants Leslie Young, Ronnie Jefferson and Chris Randall, for all their hard work in keeping the Committee running so smoothly.
	I want to concentrate on an issue that of enduring interest to the Committee—the planning, procurement and management of Government information technology projects. I was interested to hear what the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) said earlier. I shall not duplicate any of his remarks, but he made some valuable points about IT, although I think we approach the topic from different angles.
	It is a commonplace that mankind learns from its mistakes. We can think of many areas of human activity, from the building of bridges to the manufacture of aircraft, in which the consequences of failure led to improvements. The philosopher Karl Popper once said that all human knowledge was, in one way or another, the result of human beings' learning from their mistakes, and that is broadly true. The great and obvious exception to that principle is the planning, procurement and management of Government information technology projects. The Government appear to be condemned, or perhaps have condemned themselves, to repeat the mistakes of the past in an endless cycle.
	I was looking forward to a reply from the Economic Secretary to the Treasury—not because I am not pleased to see the Financial Secretary, for it is always a great pleasure to see her, but because during our February debate I suggested that the Economic Secretary that should start to publish the gateways reviews of the Office of Government Commerce. He said he would reflect on that suggestion, and I was looking forward to hearing the results of his reflection this afternoon, but I feel confident that the Economic Secretary has briefed the Financial Secretary on the result of his reflections on the benefits of publishing gateway reviews. I shall be interested to hear her conclusions—or his conclusions, on the basis of that briefing.
	Just in case the Financial Secretary has not devoted as much time to the subject as I might have hoped, let me offer her one or two hints.
	"There are still far too many projects and programmes reviewed by Gateway teams where, frankly, project planning is little better than something on the back of a  cigarette packet."
	Those are not my words; I found them on the OGC website. They are, in fact, the words of Sir Peter Gershon, the former OGC chief executive, uttered when he spoke at the project and programme management, or PPM, awards ceremony on 23 October last year.
	I firmly believe that if we are to improve things we need more scrutiny, more openness and more accountability in the system. Last week's issue of Computer Weekly—always a good read for those who want to know what IT disasters are in the pipeline—set out what was described as the life cycle of a public sector IT failure. It goes something like this.
	First, there is the project design. The design accords with the best-practice project principles, but there is an expansion of the objectives and the costs as interested parties give their views on what the new systems could do. In the second stage, an invitation to tender is issued. Civil servants faithfully reproduce the often unreasonable and, in some cases, simply ignorant demands of Ministers that the project be delivered at superhuman speed, when to anyone who knows anything about the subject the timetable looks completely unrealistic. However, the commitment to the time scales and to the project design is too great for heed to be paid to warnings from prospective end users, from trade unions, or indeed from any of the reputable prospective suppliers who are considering bidding for the project that the timetable is too tight or the scope unrealistically ambitious.
	The third stage is when contracts are awarded. After that, fuller consultation with potential end users begins, but it is usually inadequate or self-selective. In the fourth stage, the supplier begins to realise that it has overestimated its ability to understand the customer's business, and to convert that into IT systems, and the customer realises that it has overestimated the capability of the supplier. More often than not, the supplier also realises that it has not asked enough questions before signing the contract, and that the customer has not understood its own business sufficiently well to explain its work practices, the complexities of the project, the risks of failure and the real costs to the supplier.
	Now we reach the fifth stage, and the timetable begins to lengthen. The projected costs start to increase, but commitment to the project is now far too great for any indecision or U-turn to be allowed, so the Department ploughs on.
	The project starts to founder in the sixth stage, which is characterised by the beginnings of the cover up. In this stage, failure is depicted as success, and Members of Parliament do not get well-rounded answers to questions. In the seventh stage, the failure becomes apparent anyway. It is impossible to hide it because the public or the departmental end users are affected by the fact that the contract is being abandoned, changed, rewritten or even reawarded to another supplier. In the eighth stage, often years later, there are sometimes reports from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee. In the penultimate stage of the cycle, the Department says that it has learned the mistakes from the past, and those who give the assurances that lessons have been learned move on to other jobs, often in different Departments. Finally, those people are replaced by new personnel who embark on other projects that repeat the mistakes of the past, and the cycle begins anew.
	That summary is all too realistic. Over the years, the PAC has examined scores of projects that exhibit those characteristics. The Inland Revenue tax credit system, which has already been referred to, was a classic example of a supplier being pushed into adopting a wholly unrealistic timetable and of a system being launched even though the contractors knew that it did not work properly. It became impossible to hide that failure when hundreds of thousands of citizens started to complain to their Members of Parliament that they were suddenly not receiving payments that hitherto, under the old working families tax credit, they had been receiving quite smoothly. Another classic example was the passport office fiasco, where after the expenditure of many millions of pounds on a new computer system, people suddenly could not get their passports on time—something that one tends to notice if one is just about to go on holiday, no matter what smooth reassurances one gets from a Minister or computer contractor.
	Sometimes the failure is not quite so obvious to the pubic at large, but it usually comes out in the end. In Operation Telic, the UK's military operation in Iraq, when containers arrived with equipment for our armed forces in Kuwait and platoons of soldiers started to break into the containers to see what was in them and to obtain the kit that they needed—breaking in was the only way to find out what was in them—it became clear that the Ministry of Defence did not have proper asset-tracking or consignment-tracking software. It could not track its equipment as it was delivered around the world and into theatres of operation for our armed forces. Notoriously, that meant that there was not enough body armour available for our soldiers in the right places in the recent Iraq war. Let no one say that that was a cost issue: the body armour cost £169.70 per set and the MOD spent a mere £2.9 million on body armour for the recent conflict. The issue was one not of cost but of basic logistics.
	In our hearing on Operation Telic, the MOD mentioned, almost en passant, that it had spent £120 million on a bespoke tracking system before it was scrapped four years ago—incidentally, 41 times more than it spent on the body armour for the recent deployment. There was the usual story about how the money had not been wasted because it was being rolled into the next project, but the fact is that 13 years after the lack of decent consignment-tracking software was first identified in 1991, after the first Gulf war, that problem has still not been fixed, even though there are all kinds of commercially available off-the-shelf systems that tell users all that they need to know about exactly where their supplies are. For example, the American firm Caterpillar can deliver a spare part for one of its customers anywhere on the planet in 48 hours. We are familiar with firms such as Federal Express and DHL, which can routinely tell customers exactly where in the system their deliveries are at any one moment in time.
	With Government IT projects, it is endemic that there are problems that do not get solved and mistakes from which lessons are not learned—it is the same story wherever one looks. There is a fundamental inability to learn from mistakes. Apart from the cases that I have already mentioned, we had the infamous Wessex regional authority case, and the London ambulance system case in which the suppliers warned about potential problems and were ignored. We had the mess over Inland Revenue self-assessment and the mess over the Central Veterinary Laboratory database for tracking BSE. In the case of the national insurance recording system, the contract extension was double the price of the original contract, and with the caseworking system for the immigration and nationality directorate the supplier was paid for not writing software.
	In the Libra project for magistrates courts in England and Wales, which has already been briefly mentioned, costs quadrupled. The old Lord Chancellor's Department, before it was scrapped, paid some £232 million merely for 11,000 PCs, the printers and the "associated support"—whatever that means. I know that it does not include software, because that was clearly set out in the NAO report. That works out at about £20,000 per PC, or £10,000 even if we include the replacements, when it would have been perfectly possible to go down to PC World and buy the required kit for a few hundred pounds per desk.
	There was the implementation of the national probation service's information systems strategy, which had seven project managers in seven years, five of whom knew nothing about project management. The result was a system so poor that no one wanted to use it. There was the recent Criminal Records Bureau fiasco, whereby the prices quoted by potential suppliers to do the same job varied so wildly—from £250 million to £380 million—that the CRB got in another consultant to assess the relative merits of the bids, and to see where the discrepancy had arisen from. It still managed to end up paying significantly more than the highest bid.
	We have already heard about the moving of the GCHQ computer, the cost of which, according to the management's own assessment, was £40 million. However, they told the board that the cost would be £20 million—do not ask me why because I do not know—and, of course, the actual cost was £400 million. Despite the fact that the National Air Traffic Services system at Swanwick cost £337 million and supposedly offers a superior service and an immediate 40 per cent. increase in capacity, it plainly is not up to the job, as became painfully clear when all the nation's aircraft ground to a halt the other day because of problems with the West Drayton system—a system that the new Swanwick system was supposed to replace.
	Very topically, Sir Michael Bichard says in paragraph 35 of his recent inquiry that
	"although national Information Technology (IT) systems for recording intelligence were part of the original National Strategy for Police Information Systems (NSPIS) as long ago as 1994, no such system exists even now. It was, in fact, formally abandoned in 2000 at the same time as the launch of the National Police Intelligence Model (NIM), which sought to place intelligence at the heart of policing. There are still no firm plans for a national IT system in England and Wales, although, in contrast, such a system will be fully operational in Scotland by the end of this year."

Richard Allan: Does the hon. Gentleman share my fear that, in looking at all the IT failures, we might develop a very risk-averse culture whereby public authorities that do need new IT systems—the police are the classic example—do not invest in them because they are scared of what will happen down the line? That, too, would be very retrograde.

Richard Bacon: I agree that that would be retrograde. I do not think for one moment that anyone can say that the public sector is risk-averse when it comes to IT projects. The public sector takes huge risks in respect of such projects, and in the main it does not know the size of the risks that it is running.
	I want to mention two more examples. The first is the joint probation service and Prison Service offender assessment system—OAS—which is still in the pipeline. The report on that system, on which we were supposed to have taken evidence, was due in July but was postponed until 15 September. We learned as of yesterday that it has been postponed still further. Secondly, there is the national programme for IT in the health service. Key aspects of what are multi-billion pound contracts—the initial assessment was £2.3 billion, but the latest Financial Times report suggests a figure closer to £6 billion—had to be reviewed within mere months of their being signed.
	The project has seen Professor Peter Hutton, the chief clinical adviser, resign as chairman of the clinical advisory board, and until extremely recently the views of GPs had been largely ignored. Indeed, in respect of many of the other projects that we have considered, the advice of the National Audit Office concerning the need to consult early was also totally ignored. The NHS has contracted to buy far more systems in phase 1 than there is demand from hospital trusts, and in phase 2 the contractors will almost certainly be unable to meet the likely demand. Finally, GP magazine described the programme as
	"more likely to be a fiasco than the Dome".

Brian Jenkins: I listen with interest, as always, to the hon. Gentleman. He provides a list—too long a list—of near-disasters, but such contracts have been taken out with some of the best private sector companies in this country. Can he suggest a solution? Where are we to look if not to the best private sector companies in the country?

Richard Bacon: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his extremely timely intervention, because at the top of my next page it says, "What can be done?" He is right: we are talking about some of the finest and biggest computer contractors in the world. The Financial Secretary must therefore consider the possibility that something systemic is going on. It simply is not the case that everyone wants to get things wrong or to have as many disasters as possible. Something deeper is going on, and two areas deserve immediate attention, including from the Financial Secretary. To do so would not cost any money—she should be interested in that—and there would be an immediate benefit and a significant chance of improving the situation.
	The first, which I briefly mentioned in our last debate on the subject, is the publication of gateway reviews. With a record as appalling as the one that I have just cited—the hon. Member for Tamworth (Mr. Jenkins) is right that the list of mistakes is far too long—the burden is not on me to show why the Government should publish gateway reviews, but on the Government and the Financial Secretary to say why they should not publish them. What possible justification could there be for not publishing them?
	Departments often bleat about commercial confidentiality as a reason for not publishing reviews. They say that they have an agreement with a supplier and that the commercial interests of that supplier would be threatened by greater openness, but that is not necessarily what suppliers themselves say when given the chance. It was interesting to see that in the public evidence given to the Work and Pensions Committee in its ongoing inquiry into IT systems, the supplier stated that it did not have any problems with the publication of gateway reviews. On the contrary, the supplier said that it would welcome them. At the moment, it is not necessarily the case that suppliers are even aware that a gateway review is being undertaken. Amazingly, it is not a given that they know that a gateway review is happening.

Richard Allan: On that point, does the hon. Gentleman agree that it would be helpful to see the early gateway reviews—those on feasibility and all the technical issues that do not necessarily involve suppliers—when we are debating legislation? For example, when we debate the draft identity cards Bill in this place, it would be helpful to have the early gateway reviews before us, to help us think about the feasibility of implementation.

Richard Bacon: I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. While we are on the subject of ID cards, I read in Computer Weekly just recently that senior figures in the industry—including, I am delighted to say, the Government's new chief information officer—have poured scorn on the feasibility of the ID card scheme. Before the Financial Secretary goes off with her Treasury colleagues and spends thousands of millions of pounds on an ID card system, she should listen to the people in the industry who are saying that the Government's business case for ID cards is vapid. A great deal of money could be saved and spent on something that people want their taxpayers' money to be spent on. I utterly agree that the answer is to have more transparency at as early a stage as possible.
	It would be worth comparing the position that I have described with some of the well managed projects. It was noticeable that some common themes for successful projects emerged at the recent corporate IT forum—Tif—awards presentation for excellence in IT projects. I quote:
	"The successful short-listed projects all had exceptionally close links between the business leader and the project team. The 'business customer/IT supplier' approach was all but absent, and the judges saw development of integrated teams, based around common goals, with each individual or group contributing something of value to the project. There was genuine collaboration, with the programmes adding something significant to the business."
	Yet far too often with Government projects, far from having such close collaboration on the project that the business customer/IT supplier approach was all but absent, the suppliers do not even know that a gateway review is under way.
	It is not the case that suppliers are wary of such openness. It is Departments and their officials who are so wary. They are far more protective of the so-called need for commercial confidentiality, because it helps protect them from future criticism.

Brian Jenkins: I want to be clear about this in my own mind. The hon. Gentleman is intimating that the difficulty lies not with the suppliers, but with the customers, and that the customers do not want the transaction to be transparent because it may be difficult to specify the exact requirements of the project from the outset. That may result from a lack of technical ability or understanding of how the system will work. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that we do not have the necessary expertise to undertake the projects in the light of the rigour of transparency to follow?

Richard Bacon: I think that the hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The lack of procurement skill in government is quite widespread. However, I would not want to pretend for one minute that some suppliers do not also get things horribly wrong. In the case of the Libra project, for example, it was not only the Department that was responsible for the scandal, it was also the supplier—ICL/Fujitsu. To return to my earlier point, in successful projects there is close collaboration between the supplier and the Government, such that it works like a seamless collaborative integrated team.
	The hon. Member for Tamworth brings me to my next point. The Chairman mentioned Mr. John Oughton, the new chief executive of the Office of Government Commerce. Ten years ago, he was in charge of the Cabinet Office efficiency unit. He led a scrutiny study that led to the publication in August 1994 of a report called "The Government's Use of External Consultants". The frontispiece of the report carried a quotation directly relevant to what the hon. Gentleman said. It stated:
	"It is difficult to do good consultancy for a bad client, and it is difficult to do bad consultancy for a good client."
	That is true, but suppliers and Government need to be in an informed loop where they can learn from each other. Too often, suppliers are not trusted in the adult way that makes close collaboration and success more likely. Part of the answer is to publish gateway reviews, so that everyone can see where they stand—or, in some cases, simply what is going on.
	My second suggestion is more wide ranging, and it draws on experience in the US. When that country was faced with similar problems, Congress passed the Clinger-Cohen Act 1996, which provides a statutory framework of accountability. The US Government recognised that the lack of accountability, particularly in IT projects, and a culture of secrecy and cover-up had contributed to major failures in IT projects. The Clinger-Cohen Act, in essence, requires Departments to report contemporaneously to Congress on the progress, or otherwise, of projects, and to disclose any deviations from standing orders.
	If we had a similar system here, following a gateway review that revealed a red light on a project, it would—as a matter of course and at an early stage—become public knowledge that the Department concerned was facing a red light. In particular, it would automatically become public knowledge if a Department went through a red light.
	Last week, the Committee published a report on Customs and Excise and its use of electronic delivery to transform its services to customers. The report refers to the fact that Customs faces an OGC gateway review, as many Departments do. It also notes that Customs should have had a sensitivity analysis, but that it plainly did not. It says that there should be proper management of consultants, and that there should be an overall, senior responsible owner.
	It is extraordinary that, even now, we must tell Departments that they should have proper management of consultants and that they should have overall senior responsible owners for their projects. However, we still do not know for certain whether a red light was flagged up by the gateway review process that Customs and Excise then went through. That is how it appears, but we do not know for certain, because the OGC's gateway reviews are not routinely published. I think that they should be.
	Legislation that provides a clear framework for accountability would be an important step in forcing the searchlight into some of the darker corners of IT projects, where the natural tendency is to cover up mistakes. There is an important contrast with what happens in the private sector. People often say that mistakes are made in the private sector too, and they are right: there are many such mistakes, but there is an important difference.
	I spoke at a conference for IT suppliers a few months ago. The Committee's Chairman gets many invitations and is very kind in refusing them and palming them off to other members of the Committee. It is a matter of duty, I suppose. Before the conference, I was talking to a supplier who worked in both the public and private sectors. I asked her what was the main difference between the two sectors, and she said there were two differences—speed and commitment.
	In the private sector, greater speed applies to decisions, and to the rapidity with which the plug is pulled if it becomes clear that circumstances have changed, that the market has moved or that the project has been rendered irrelevant by other changes. The supplier said that commitment is what top management in the private sector devotes to a project. That commitment is far too often lacking in Government projects.
	I repeat my two proposals for the Financial Secretary's consideration—that gateway reviews should be published as a matter of course, and that a statutory framework for openness and accountability should be introduced, building on the lessons of the Clinger-Cohen Act.
	The Financial Secretary may say no to my proposals, and she may assert that they are not necessary. However, given the public sector's catastrophic record in procuring IT projects under Governments of all political complexions, the Treasury has to do more. It must say whose side it is on. Is it on the side of taxpayers and citizens, who expect good value and service for the taxes that they pay, or not?
	Unless the Treasury is prepared to change, the IT disasters will continue to happen—not because anyone wants them to, but largely because there are no real obstacles in the path of failure.

Jon Cruddas: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) and I shall cover some of the points that he raised later in my remarks. I have a few general comments about the work of the Committee before making some specific remarks about public expenditure. Like other members of the Committee, I wish to place on record my appreciation of the work of the people who service it. Nick Wright and his staff do a tremendous job, especially for newer members of the Committee. I joined just before the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan), who joined in late autumn last year. In those early months, the staff walked me through the methodology of the Committee and an impenetrable series of reports, and I bear witness to the work that they do on behalf of all of us.
	I also wish to praise the work of the National Audit Office. It is commonly understood that every £1 spent by the NAO saves the taxpayer some £8, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) pointed out. The NAO also provides a key check on Government activity by its own existence. That is demonstrated by the seriousness with which accounting officers take preparing to appear before the Committee as witnesses. That itself is a check on the activities of Government.
	The volume of work carried out by the Committee was mentioned earlier. It covers a staggering amount of territory across all Departments. It covers the general and the specific, the macro and the micro elements of public expenditure. As such, it proves the uniqueness of its contributions. No other Committee can provide the rigour of analysis that the PAC does in terms of the conclusions it draws about Government activity.
	The civil service comes out well from the deliberations of the PAC. Time and again, I am impressed by the commitment to public service that we witness in our deliberations. I also respect the tradition whereby civil servants take responsibility for the actions of those who preceded them and who, more often than not, took the decisions that we are investigating. To me, that remains an honourable tradition, and it is displayed week in and week out. I have one slight caveat, however, and that is the recent incident when reports on the public-private partnership on the tube were issued very late for our hearing last Wednesday. That was regrettable, because the impression was given that someone was holding off signing off the report to put more pressure on the NAO as it came up against the Committee's deadlines. It would be a concern if such pressure were to blur the edges of any NAO conclusions, although I have no specific evidence that that has been done.
	Overall, I find being a member of the Committee and its work deeply rewarding, although it is difficult at times to assimilate the data and research projects that await us in our folders every week before the Committee meets. I find the politics of the Committee fascinating. It operates in a non-partisan way, which is especially impressive when we consider that it covers the key political battleground between the two main political parties—the efficiency of the Government in using our constituents' tax revenues. No votes are taken in the Committee: its conclusions remain unanimous. Indeed, if an outsider considered the workings of the Committee, it would be difficult for them to ascertain the political loyalties of a specific questioner in any given debate. That reflects well on the Committee and strengthens the conclusions it reaches.
	None of that is to say that Committee members cannot draw their own conclusions for use outside the Committee. For example, given the speech today by the hon. Member for South Norfolk, I eagerly await his next article in The Daily Telegraph to reinforce his argument in an earlier article that
	"if we stopped the haemorrhage of cash from our public sector we would have to worry less about extra taxes and borrowing".
	In terms of waste, the hon. Gentleman is correct to list examples that the Committee has considered and that are contained in the reports before us. For example, there is the £7 billion to £10 billion in unpaid VAT lost to Customs and Excise. Several hon. Members have mentioned the £400 million spent on the new GCHQ building, when the management were informed that it would cost some £20 million. The sorry tale of equipment at the Child Support Agency has been touched on. Last week, we heard about the extraordinary amount of money spent on establishing the public-private partnership for the London underground and we shall look at that again. A general leakage of public money to consultants, financiers and middlemen is evident in the PFI projects we consider. There is the sorry tale of the refinancing of British Energy and the costs of specific items of kit in the Ministry of Defence—the list could go on and on.
	The issue is not waste alone, however; it is waste alongside reform. At times, there is a danger that we may look at the work of the Committee in a slightly unbalanced fashion, considering only the failings in Government strategy, expenditure and management of resources. That is only one side of the equation. Analysis of waste must be considered alongside the evidence we receive of changes in the expenditure strategies deployed by the state. That is all the more important when we have a Government who believe in the role of the state and who are investing a further £61 billion of taxpayers' money in public services.
	The NAO report, "Managing Resources to Deliver Better Public Services" provides balance when considering the reports put before the Committee. The NAO suggests a greater focus on delivery and an attempt to grapple with short-termism, through annual cash accounting with money handed back at the end of the year. It suggests a new emphasis on performance outcomes and that, among other things, we should consider whether the move to accruals-based accounting would better inform state expenditure. It considers the relative effectiveness of three-year comprehensive spending review periods, the flexibility to carry forward budgets and so forth. It will be interesting to see how those changes improve the relative efficiency of the state in managing and spending our resources. As the NAO stated:
	"new flexibilities and changes in the way resources can be managed, if used effectively, should make an important contribution to improving public services".
	Against a changing background, where the Government are trying systematically to rebuild the public services of our country, the work of the Committee is centre stage and is even more important in terms of the general political debates that arise from its deliberations.
	The Committee considers the most important domestic political issues and the key political battleground for western market economies—how public resources are utilised and the efficiency of the public sector.

Howard Flight: I wholly agree with what the hon. Gentleman is saying. Is it not sad that more Members did not turn up for this debate which is at the centre of the issues of our times?

Jon Cruddas: I take the hon. Gentleman's point, but before I became a member of the Committee I did not realise how penetrating its proceedings were and the fact that they form the cornerstone of all political discourse in terms of the core issues of tax expenditure, perceptions about the role of the state—which divide political parties—the role of intervention versus markets, devolution, centralisation, central planning versus more devolved decision-making and the like. All those issues will be centre stage over the next 12 months, if there is an election, and they all have a route back to the core terrain over which the PAC presides every week. That makes our work more rewarding, but also more complex, given the amount of information on which we have to deliberate.
	The conclusions of the Government efficiency review—part of the overall spending review about which we shall hear soon—will be of interest in the process of debating waste and reform. We know that the general shape of that work is to release more money down to the front line. We hear a lot of talk about that, as we do about reducing bureaucracy. In general, we know which changes are being considered: a focus on procurement, given Sir Peter Gershon's work at the OGC; a look at emptying back-office functions, given technological change; better use of IT in the delivery of services; examination of the devolved agencies—for example, their regulation regimes; and a look at bureaucracy in the public services.
	I presume that those factors will inform a lot of the Committee's work in future. Indeed, they will inform a lot of the political battleground right up to the next election, which we touched on earlier. It will be interesting to see how the Committee's work can remain separate from heightened political debate and controversy about investment and reform in the public services and the role of the state itself, as we move into a heightened election gearing.
	I want to make a simple final point about how the Committee's work and general political debate about the respective economic efficiency of state activity interrelates with what may be described as spatial economic development. One aspect that has tended to be underplayed in the debate about investment and reform in the public sector and the Government's strategy is whether it is cross-referenced with the dynamic spatial economic change in our country. At times, our sittings imply a static model of resource allocation on the basis of a certain population distribution.
	I shall give an example that has been the subject of questioning during some recent sittings. It is estimated that London will grow by some 700,000 people in the next 10 to 15 years. For example, my borough's population is 155,000—the smallest in London—but it will grow by an estimated 50,000 in the next 10 to 15 years. It sits at the geographical centre of the so-called Thames gateway—a key growth area in the Government's sustainable communities agenda. I simply flag that up to make a number of simple points.
	The Committee considers the complex issues of resource allocation and expenditure. We find that those issues become even more complex when analysed alongside current and projected population movements. For example, the Department of Health accepts, as did Sir Nigel Crisp during one of our recent sittings, that the budget allocations for the primary care trusts in my borough are underfunded by about £24 million. That figure was calculated before taking account of the major changes in population that are anticipated for the next 10 years. The comprehensive spending review will presumably consider both that structural underfunding and future budgeting, given the growth in that illustrative borough.
	Let us take another example. The Government are setting up new delivery vehicles for economic regeneration. Last week, we processed the order to establish an east London urban development corporation to work alongside the London Development Agency and a host of other regional and sub-regional economic partnerships to spend public money. At times, it looks as though a jungle of structures and responsibilities operates within a positive sum game of financial investment by the state. How all that works through to public service delivery on the ground will be the real test of Government strategy in my constituency during the next 10 years.
	We as a Committee are starting to study some of those interrelationships, but they will provide a rich seam of work in the next few years. I do not underestimate the difficulties for the state in its various manifestations, given the relative efficiency of its activities. Everything else being equal, cutting waste and boosting efficiency is a tough job, but when the population is radically changing, an even more complex task is at hand. To cut short my comments, I very much enjoy the work of the Committee. It provides a unique service to this country's taxpayers, but I do not underestimate the difficulties that lie ahead in monitoring the activities of the state in its various manifestations.

Brian Jenkins: It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas). I always find PAC debates fascinating; they are some of the best that take place in the Chamber. In fact, I congratulate every hon. Member who has spoken in the debate, particularly the Chairman of our Committee. Although from the Opposition, he has always been a very good Chairman in his manner, attitude and diligence, and I know that he will maintain that stance. He has brought credit to our Committee. I also thank the staff of our Committee, without whom we would not be able to work, and, of course, I thank the NAO.
	As I am speaking towards the end of the debate, I do not want to repeat arguments made by other hon. Members—four pages of my speech on computers and software have gone for a start. I decided to take a new tack, so as I sat redrafting my words, it struck me that we are not opposed to innovation. We support and welcome innovation and risk taking in Departments, because if things do not work, at least they tried. We must overcome risk avoidance and complacency in Departments. Are Departments complacent and do they still know best? Ninety per cent. of the work done by Departments goes well, but they have no discipline in the marketplace. We, the members of the Public Accounts Committee, must search to achieve improved efficiency for the taxpayer and to help each Minister to achieve departmental delivery. National Audit Office reports are often enlightening, even for departmental heads, as we found when producing our reports.
	What of complacency? Is Sir Humphrey alive and well in Whitehall? I have picked two reports at random, so we can determine whether our recommendations were accepted. First, I shall address the report "PFI: the new headquarters for the Home Office". I am glad that the Financial Secretary is in the Chamber because I know that she will make notes on what I say and take them back to the relevant people. The Committee's first conclusion said:
	"Under-forecasting of staff numbers leads to bad decisions on accommodation  . . . departments have assumed much lower staff numbers than they have subsequently employed. The buildings have  . . . not been large enough to hold everyone. Yet such projects are often justified  . . . by the advantages of bringing everyone under one roof. The Home Office assumed that staff numbers would reduce  . . . Instead, numbers increased dramatically between 1998 and 2003  . . . Similar stories arose at  . . . the Ministry of Defence, and the former Department of Social Security."
	Was that recommendation accepted? The Home Office said:
	"The Home Office notes the Committee's conclusion. While good forecasting of staff numbers is important  . . . there are bound to be uncertainties in any forecasts for long timescales."
	I think that the period between 1998 and 2003 fits in with a five-year plan well. If the Home Office cannot administer the numbers over five years, we are in trouble.
	The next part of the Home Office's response is very illuminating because it says:
	"The current plan is to use 2 Marsham Street to accommodate those staff  . . . expected to remain in central London".
	However, it says that it intends to relocate
	"the National Offender Management Service away from London  . . . That will be achievable if funds are available to meet the cost of relocating  . . . and a move offers value for money."
	I say, "Thank you, but no thank you."
	The Committee's second recommendation said that if Home Office numbers fall, it
	"should identify other Government departments whose staff can fill up the new building."
	However, the Home Office response was:
	"The Home Office currently anticipates that all the accommodation in 2 Marsham Street will be required at the time it takes possession of the building in early 2005."
	So, No. 2 Marsham street will be full of Home Office staff.

Richard Bacon: While the hon. Gentleman is on the subject of the Home Office and PFI, does he find it odd that it had to pay £2.75 million to insert the refinancing clause in the contract, as the report identified, but that the Treasury managed to insert a similar clause for free when negotiating its contract? Does that suggest to him, as it does to me, that the Treasury is not keeping a sufficiently close eye on other Departments or promulgating best practice well enough?

Brian Jenkins: The hon. Gentleman is jumping ahead of me; I will come to that point in a moment.
	We expect numbers of staff in the Department to fall and to take full advantage of the opportunity provided by Sir Michael Lyons's review on relocation. The Home Office said that the number of its staff
	"accommodated in central London is expected to reduce significantly".
	It said that because
	"2 Marsham Street comprises three  . . . blocks it would be possible to share occupation with other Government Departments",
	but surely all Departments will have reduced numbers of staff in the next three years. We also recommend that agencies and non-departmental bodies that are required to remain in London move to No. 2, Marsham street to fill the space. The private finance initiative, however, may cause problems, because lease and operational arrangements are difficult to change. The Home Office, however, says that the lease does not differ from any other lease and that, as the landlord, it will negotiate alterations.
	There is no reason why Prison Service headquarters should remain in London. Subject to funds being found, and a satisfactory business case being made, relocation could be achieved by 2008. It is proposed that by 2005 Home Office staff will move into the new building, which is large enough to accommodate Prison Service headquarters. By 2008, however, if funds are found, those staff may have moved out of London. I am not sure whether the Home Office knows exactly what it is going to do with the building or the estate, but as the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) said, its decision to pay £2.75 million for refinancing is strange.
	The PAC has looked at refinancing deals in which the PFI arranger refinances the deal and takes a windfall profit. The Home Office would take a share of such profit, but its reasons for paying £2.75 million for the deal are unclear. I doubt whether it would take the same action again, even though it has broken new ground.
	The last part of the report deals with the future of Horseferry house. As there is a falling property market in London, we thought that the Home Office—like all Departments, it is pressed for cash—might want to get rid of it, and the report says:
	"The Home Office expects to declare Horseferry House surplus to requirements in the very near future."
	When the Home Office does so, the building can be put on the market.
	Our recommendations on PFI for Home Office headquarters are not being taken seriously enough. The Home Office has managed to skirt around them and, in true Sir Humphrey style, has decided that it knows best. It is complacent, because it knows that the Treasury will top up the money every year without looking for efficiency.
	The Department for Education and Skills accepted some recommendations in the 19th report, our first conclusion of which was that inspection reports on secondary schools should be made available to parents, as not all parents are aware of the full range of information sources on school performance. They may not have access to the internet, may not go to the local library, and may not have a total commitment to securing the future of their children. The Department accepted that recommendation, but went on to say that
	"70–80 per cent. of homes with school-aged children have internet access."
	The Department's website had about 400,000 hits last year, and it said:
	"Hard copies of performance tables are available in local libraries . . . —some 10,000 telephone calls requesting one or more copies were received last year . . . The Ofsted web-site attracts in excess of 120 million hits a year . . . The Department recognises the need to improve communications to parents . . . The Department is currently consulting on the development of a new annual School Profile."
	Having listened to our recommendations, the Department leapt into action. It told us exactly what it was doing—it was remiss of us not to know—and it will consult on a new school profile. It has, however, accepted our recommendations in words but not in spirit.
	Our second conclusion was that information on schools should include "important external factors", as a school can move from the bottom 20 per cent. to the top 20 per cent. if those factors are taken into consideration. In deprived areas where children do not have the advantage of their parents' support, they do not come to school with a peer group that wants and respects education, so they are at a tremendous disadvantage. The Department agrees with the Committee that external factors other than the pupils' prior attainment can significantly affect the performance of a school.
	The Department's response goes on to tell me in almost every other paragraph why such factors cannot be taken into account. We are told:
	"Value added (VA) measures were introduced into the secondary school performance tables (PT) in 2002."
	That is fair enough. The Department and Ofsted go on to say:
	"The PT methodology was developed through extensive consultation with schools and local education authorities. . . At the time this methodology was developed, VA was not a concept generally understood outside the statistical community, and certainly not by the public at large"—
	in other words, parents. So what is the point of publishing added value tables for people who would not understand them? But our recommendation was accepted, of course.
	The document continues:
	"The priority was to find a simple and transparent approach . . . there were also fears that including factors other than prior attainment might risk suggesting an acceptance of poor educational outcomes for particular groups of pupils."
	What does that mean? It means that if we accept that a school attended by disadvantaged children turns out lower grades on the performance table, which are rather raw material, the school might lower its expectations. Unfortunately, that misses the point. The point is that if a school is given a value added criterion instead of a raw table showing the qualifications produced, the school will recognise that it is doing good work, its morale will be reinforced and that will drive standards up. That is the reverse of the first comment.
	I may be misreading the document and I may be disingenuous to those who wrote it, but when they come up with Sir Humphrey-speak time and again, they can expect it to be misinterpreted. Our Committee should start examining the Government reactions to our comments and recommendations.
	The Department is to investigate and develop a more sophisticated value added methodology and it accepts the recommendation that social and economic deprivation should be taken into account in assessing the performance of schools. As we all know, increased income support and working families tax credit may take pupils out of the category eligible for free school meals, so a different method of evaluation is needed, rather than clinging to the free school meals criterion, as the Department does.
	I shall skip a couple of recommendations because of the time. We recommended adjusted performance measures because we concluded that beacon schools, faith schools and single-sex schools do better than average. We stated:
	"The strengths of these schools, such as a strong set of values and ethos, should be identified by the Department and promoted across the school sector."
	In paragraph 21 the Department accepts the recommendation. In paragraphs 22 to 25 we are told what the Department is doing in that regard—not what it will do, but the state of play prior to our receiving the response. The Department says that such schools
	"tend to have strong values and a unique ethos. Many draw from communities that particularly value education . . . Parents who seek out faith schools"—
	remember, the interested parents, the ones who care, who are concerned about their children's education and who value education—
	"may provide their children with a high level of support. Social background may also be a consideration. On average faith schools have fewer pupils with free school means than other schools."
	Surprise, surprise.
	Paragraphs 27 to 30 go on to tell us what is being done at present.
	Ofsted accepts our recommendations. The Department accepts our recommendations. We asked for funding to be open, transparent and accountable. The Department agreed, but then said that that might cause friction. Why? Because if funding were open, transparent and accountable, people who feel that their schools are under-funded might be able to further their case. Staffordshire and Tamworth contain schools in deprived areas, and the social make-up of such schools is the same in any city in this country. Because the county is wealthy, however, those schools are denied funds. The Department spoke to head teachers, parents and LEAs, but it did not speak to Members of Parliament, although hopefully it will change its mind.
	I enjoy being a member of the PAC, which does a worthwhile job. I shall continue to attend as best I can, but I wish that more hon. Members would take an interest and read our reports, and I also hope that Front Benchers stop using snippets from our reports out of context.

Ian Davidson: I shall start with a tribute to the Chairman, of whom I heard from one of my hon. Friends the high words of praise, "He is not nearly as bad as was expected." In my view, he is a judicious and tolerant Chair, and my only criticism is that my 10 minutes are never as long as those allowed to other hon. Members. It is worth mentioning that, to his eternal credit, the Chairman turned out for the parliamentary rugby team—we did not pass to him, but we were just getting our own back.
	I also pay tribute to Sir John Bourn and the senior officers of the NAO who attend our Committee, as well as to the NAO staff who do not attend, but who undoubtedly perform valuable work in the background, and I also thank the Committee staff. Before I thank my parents, my schoolteachers and everyone whom I have ever met, burst into tears and accept my award, I shall mention the other members of the Committee.
	It is valuable that many members of the Committee act as if they were self-employed by raising their interests in Committee, rather than being spoon-fed prepared questions, which happens in several other Select Committees. For example, the contributions made by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg) are invariably drawn from his constituency, which is invaluable because they illustrate how policies that we discuss in theory impact on real people in real situations.
	The hon. Members for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) and for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) spoke at length about IT projects, during which time I found myself losing the will to live—it is important that some members of the Committee take an interest in such things. I perked up when the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam mentioned beer, but I understand that he used the word in a technical sense. In my view, hell will be a never-ending discussion about the gateway process for IT projects. I am pleased that the Committee includes anoraks; I am just glad that I am not one of them.
	Before we get too pleased with ourselves, some points must be made about some of the senior officials who appear in front of us. It is true that many of them are extremely bright and able—I do not object to being patronised by my intellectual superiors, otherwise I would go through life in a state of perpetual irritation. Given the return of "Come Dancing", however, we should consider giving scores to some of the witnesses. When I refurbished my house, I used a leaflet from Pilkington Glass that lists various types of frosted glass according to an obscuration index. Some of the officials who come before us knowing that we have a limited amount of time deliberately attempt to lead us in the wrong direction and to obscure the points that we are trying to elucidate. On some occasions our mild-mannered Chairman should rebuke them more severely than he does. We also need a bullshit detector for some of the responses that we get from officials, not all of whom are as frank as they should be.
	The final category should be the smugness score. Some officials are so pleased with themselves that if they were made of chocolate they would eat themselves, as we would say in Glasgow. I am tempted to name and shame them, but they are so conceited that I suspect that they would take it as a compliment.
	It is not entirely a question of the culture in the civil service. Yesterday, we discussed complex and serious issues with officials from the Department for International Development. Their open and honest approach—they were frank, helpful and constructive—was in stark contrast to the way in which some other officials deal with such matters. Officials should be encouraged to prepare for our meetings in a way that allows them to be more helpful and constructive.
	Most of the reports that we produce are fully acted upon. However, in the case of the report on the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel in relation to the sheep regime, the points that we made were not adequately accepted. That was a revelation in terms not only of the incompetence and dishonesty that was practised in that area of the budget, but of the stunning complacency of the Department's response. The report was a pretty damning indictment, yet in its responses it appeared to be unwilling to accept some of the criticism.
	Conclusion 1 of the Committee's report states:
	"It is of major concern that the level of discrepancies noted by the Department's inspectors, when accompanied on farm visits by the Audit Office, was many times higher than when they were not accompanied. It appears to us that, by turning a blind eye to irregularities during on-farm visits, some inspectors were complicit with farmers in claiming more money than they were properly due."
	In its response, the Department said that it
	"takes very seriously the view expressed by the Committee in relation to possible collusion . . . There is no evidence that collusion has taken place or that inspectors failed to follow agreed procedures . . . However it does recognise that inspectors had been provided with a considerable degree of discretion, in relation to the type of irregularities that can be reported during the inspection process."
	That is a particularly mealy-mouthed way of admitting that errors were made.
	The Department gives every indication of being in denial about the scale of the difficulties that we outlined. Our report rather modestly states:
	"We were surprised to find that payments were being made for sheep that had apparently died".
	The Department's response is inadequate. It says:
	"From January 2004,"—
	that is, some considerable time after not only the Committee's hearing, but the NAO's investigation—
	"with the banning of on-farm burial, sight of fresh carcasses or appropriate documentation is now obligatory"
	and that
	"penalties will be rigorously applied"
	for future errors. We must continue to monitor that policy to ensure that it is applied in the appropriate circumstances.
	Our conclusion states:
	"We find the circumstances surrounding the Department's 1998 decision to allow payments for sheep at unnotified locations extraordinary."
	It was not only
	"contrary to EU rules, but the Department has no record of its decision, despite a senior official apparently travelling to Brussels to discuss the matter."
	The Department's response was:
	"The Department regrets that there is no record of the specific meeting in Brussels where the acceptability of the Department's interpretation of the EU requirements was confirmed."
	The response continues the same vein. I can cite several more examples of similar evasive responses from the Department in Northern Ireland. That is entirely unsatisfactory.
	Another part of the report states:
	"The Department's failure to properly address the weaknesses in control, highlighted by the European Court of Auditors in 1994, was a serious error in judgement."
	The Department responds by saying:
	"The Department accepts that it should have been more diligent".
	Well, that is good of it. I wonder whether anybody in the Northern Ireland civil service has been disciplined, sacked, transferred or rebuked. What does it show when a devastating report is produced but the relevant Department refuses to accept responsibility for its mistakes and is apparently in denial? That is unacceptable.
	I could read out many similar examples, but I shall draw attention to only one more. Our conclusion 25 states:
	"Our overall impression is that the Department has in the past been soft on fraud and this has contributed to unacceptably high levels of fraud within Northern Ireland agriculture."
	The Department had the cheek to respond:
	"The Department notes the views of the Committee and deeply regrets the impression created that it has in the past been soft on fraud. It would assure the Committee that this is not the case."
	That is utterly incorrect. It is clear that the Department regrets being found out and that is unacceptable. It continues in its defence:
	"In addition, the Department is working with its stakeholders, including farmer representative bodies, to promote high levels of probity".
	If the police in Pollok met the national union of burglars to discuss the disappearance of articles from houses in the area, one would not necessarily expect a consensus. I am not convinced that farmers' representative bodies are entirely clean in the matters that we are discussing. It is difficult to believe, when the report identifies that in one specific area 58 per cent. of claims for foot and mouth were fraudulent or partly fraudulent, that some collusion with the overall farming body did not occur. In those circumstances, much more needs to be done.
	I have tried not to stray from the list of items that is being discussed. However, I want to mention the National Audit Office's work on the report on health and safety in construction, which we shall debate later. Aileen Murphy and her staff were helpful and constructive in moving that forward.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) made a point about comparing and contrasting. I welcome the fact that devolution allows us to make comparisons between Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland and so on. I hope that we will do much more of that. There is scope for comparing and contrasting in a way that can serve only to drive up standards of public provision. However, we should make more international comparisons. Although we have had contacts with the French and the Germans and we shall make contacts with the Spanish, we should also compare and contrast some of our work, not least on European Union agriculture subsidies. I am sure that if there is rank fraud and corruption in EU agriculture subsidies in this country, we can learn lessons from efforts to combat such practices in other partner states.
	I am glad to have been able to participate in the work of the Committee over the past few years. It has been one of the most useful and worthwhile things that I have done as a Member of Parliament, and I want to pay tribute not only to my colleagues on the Committee but to the Chairman for his inspiration and leadership of the Committee.

Howard Flight: May I add my thanks and congratulations to the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), the Public Accounts Committee, the National Audit Office and Sir John Bourn for their excellent work? As ever, we have had an excellent debate, and I should like to comment particularly on the contributions of the hon. Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas), which went to the heart of why this work is so important, my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), who focused on the area that we are most failing to address and which wastes the most in the public sector, and the hon. Member for Glasgow, Pollok (Mr. Davidson), who made a most witty and incisive thrust into some of the key areas that are so unsatisfactory.
	I congratulate the Chairman on his excellent opening speech and wholly agree with his two messages: that greater efficiency is all about achieving better delivery of public services, and that there is a need for far better project management in the public sector, especially in information technology services. For nearly a year, I have been working with some 60 professionals who have been seconded and volunteered to work with David James in 15 teams to examine, on a bottom-up basis, how to achieve greater efficiency in the public sector. To date, at least, that work has been carried out in a great deal more depth than the Gershon report.
	I find it depressing that, notwithstanding the response that people are "taking note", so much more could be achieved if the recommendations of the PAC reports were put into practice. Hon. Members mentioned the fact that the NAO makes savings eight times greater than its costs, but they could be massively greater if its findings were listened to and put into effect. The Chairman was right to say that that issue is at the centre of our political life today, given the massive increase in spending by an unreformed public sector that appears unable to deploy the money to adequate effect or to deliver.
	The investigations of the PAC are conducted on an issue-by-issue basis. In the United States, according to statute, bodies must regularly audit the operational efficiency of the public sector entities, and perhaps what is missing in this country is an ongoing review of the efficiency and operational structures of much of the public sector.
	The reports that we have debated today deal with some £60 billion of public expenditure, which, along with those that we discussed in our debate in February, give a total of £310 billion of expenditure. I shall not repeat the comments made by many who have spoken today, but many issues struck me as I read through the reports. One thing that I particularly value about participating in these debates is the discipline that it imposes on me to find out what is being said in the busy life of this place.
	The first report said that the Inland Revenue had got out of date in dealing with tax compliance strategy. It is interesting that, just as the Government are tightening up on avoidance, the report should find that the Inland Revenue has gone soft on evasion.
	That is not a particularly good message to send to the public at large, because evasion is a far greater and more difficult problem than avoidance.
	The much quoted—understandably so—report on the sheep premiums scheme in Northern Ireland is a classic example of what is wrong with such schemes, what will inevitably happen and what is happening in many different areas all over the EU. The poor delivery by the Forensic Science Service agency, which has missed targets for five years, struck me as a classic case for privatisation, in which a public body has apparently been quite unable to achieve efficiency, whether through an efficiently priced private finance initiative or something greater. Most of the funding for the Warm Front scheme does not help those in most need: only a third of the grants help the fuel poor, and a third of fuel-poor households are not eligible for grants. That is a classic example of an ill-thought-out political gesture, and of tinkering that does not achieve its objectives and wastes taxpayers' money.
	The report on expenditure on regional assistance and enterprise grants in England shows that, 14 years on, and £1.4 billion of expenditure later, the economic gap remains just as wide. That suggests not that the principle is wrong, but that the measures deployed have manifestly not succeeded in narrowing the economic gap. On Wembley, to which reference has been made, let us imagine handing over £120 million to another party without any guarantee or contribution from that party—in this case, the Football Association. Although taxpayers ended up paying for a fifth of the funding, they will not receive any benefit if the stadium is financially successful—what a completely uncommercial way of running Wembley and of looking after the interests of taxpayers.
	The ninth report focused on the community grant to the National Coalition Of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, which found that the NCADA had used the funding for dubious campaigning that opposed any form of immigration controls whatever. I thought that I was reading a report on the EU budget, because this is another classic example of how public money must not be spent on indulging interest groups.
	The 10th report is easily the most important, on which both my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk and the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) made extremely valuable contributions. Ultimately, the issue is not learning from experience—as I commented last year, there is much to learn from how Italy, of all countries, has achieved far greater efficiency in the implementation of public sector IT investment and, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk pointed out, from some of the disciplines that have been used in the US.
	The 12th report displays no evidence of benefit eligibility decision making having improved at the Department for Work and Pensions, which the Chancellor contradicted at last week's Question Time. Overall, 24 per cent. of decisions contained errors, and 45 per cent. of disability living allowance claims contained errors. Essentially, it is a problem of a benefit system whose complexity is causing problems both for citizens and its administration.
	The PFI for the Home Office was quoted. The one issue that was not quoted, which tells us so much, was that the Home Office might reconsider its implausibly high assumption that 1,300 officials and support staff need regular ministerial access. In relation to moving the civil service out of London, the same principle obtains right across the board.
	The 17th report looks at hip replacements and the use of hip prostheses, in respect of which there is inadequate evidence. It also contains the important statistic that hip replacement costs vary from £2,266 in one hospital to £7,456 in another. That is unacceptable if we are to have a much more efficient national health service. One of those hospitals is extremely efficient, while the other is, by implication, extremely inefficient. Much can be learned from such figures about possible ways of improving NHS efficiency.

Brian Jenkins: The problem is the number of operations performed. A hospital that performs five operations a year is not in the same economic league as one that performs 50 or 60. It is a question of getting the specialism in the right place.

Howard Flight: It is indeed a question of making the NHS more efficient by helping hospitals to specialise, and to become better at those specialisms.
	The reports overall spoke to me of a public sector in need of major structural reform. They tell a sad tale of inadequate management, and many major areas of waste and inefficiency. It is clear that the public sector should be able to deliver better, and to produce better value for the taxpayer. Merely spending more money is not enough; structure and management are in urgent need of reform.

Ruth Kelly: We have had an excellent debate, which has shown the special contribution that the PAC makes to our system of parliamentary scrutiny of the Executive. It has reminded us of the key role played by the Committee in highlighting ways in which better value can be obtained from public spending. I pay tribute to its work and in particular to its Chairman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), who has ensured that its work is done in a manner that makes clear the reasons for the success or failure of projects or schemes. That approach ensures that lessons are learnt for the future, and that good practice is promoted.
	Before I comment on the relationship between the PAC and the Treasury and respond as fully as I can in the time available to some of the points that have been raised, I too must pay tribute to the assistance that the Committee has received from the Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, and his staff at the National Audit Office. Their role as independent scrutineers of central Government spending is central to the process of ensuring the accountability of the Executive. The NAO's financial audit work and value-for-money studies continue to make an important contribution to efforts to improve the standards of financial stewardship in Departments, and the effectiveness of public spending.
	Many Members have singled out the role played by the NAO, particularly my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who sadly cannot be present—although he gave me notice of that. I commend him on his long service to the Committee. He made sensible points about the workings of the Committee, and brought his experience to bear. I know that he retains a keen interest in the Committee's access to the civil list. I remind him, and other Committee members, that it has long been the policy of successive Governments that Ministers stand between the royal family and Parliament. That approach has been agreed on both sides of the House.
	Other Members also made important points about the workings of the Committee, and I am sure that they will continue to bring their expertise to bear. My hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas) pointed out that the Committee was central to political discourse, and I entirely agree. He challenged not just the Committee but the Government to define the way in which the need for spatial economic analysis was taken into account. That is something that we should reflect on further as we prepare our approach to public spending in future years and as the Committee carries out its scrutiny in years to come.
	I note the touch of scepticism brought to the debate by my hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow, Pollok (Mr. Davidson) and for Tamworth (Mr. Jenkins) over how the Government have responded to some of the points made by the Committee, but I assure the House that we take the recommendations extremely seriously. The Committee and the Government have a shared responsibility to ensure that taxpayers' money is used economically, efficiently and effectively, and we want to see the delivery of public services to a high standard, drawing on the skills of the private sector, working together and applying best practice in financial and project management. We have to ensure that the extra investment flowing into public services leads to the significant improvements that the public expect and deserve.
	This is probably not the best place to enter into a partisan debate about the role of public spending, as the Committee traditionally has a commendable, non-partisan approach. However, I should like to respond to some of the points of detail raised. The hon. Member for Gainsborough reminded us in his opening remarks of the considerable ground that the Committee has covered since February, and I commend all Members who have contributed to that important work. The Committee has rightly continued to take an interest in the efficiency of the social security system. One report that it considered was entitled "Progress in improving the medical assessment of incapacity and disability benefits". I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), whose contribution to these debates I always enjoy. He brings to them great insight and passion for his subject, but also good humour. I am sure that Members on both sides welcome that.
	It is fair to say that we share my hon. Friend's and the Committee's concern about the complexity of benefit systems, which raises difficult issues about targeting benefits at those who need them. However, the Department for Work and Pensions is committed to trying to make the system easier to understand and improving the accuracy of decisions. Of course, the Committee has made valuable recommendations that the Department has taken into account, and it is only right to point out that the Committee has concluded that since 2001, performance has improved in many aspects of medical assessment. The DWP has taken action on all the Committee's earlier recommendations. New performance targets have been set out, which either have been met or are on track to being met. The Committee has also recognised the action taken to enhance the training of doctors and to improve the quality of medical reports.
	As the hon. Member for Gainsborough pointed out in his opening speech, better services and efficiency savings are two sides of the same coin, and he pointed to the concrete savings that the DWP has achieved, partly as a result of the Committee's recommendations. The backlog of incapacity benefit examinations was fully cleared by March 2004, and the result was a one-off saving to the taxpayer of £10.9 million. The time taken to complete personal capability assessments since 2001 has been reduced, resulting in an updated estimate of annual savings of £21 million. The overall saving to the taxpayer is therefore nearly £32 million. It is only right that we always focus on ways of improving efficiency and at the same time delivering better public services.
	A great deal of interest in IT procurement and software has been expressed by members of the Committee on both sides. That is an emotive issue, and I certainly recognise the difficulties with IT procurement, but I merely point out to the Committee that they are not unique to the United Kingdom. Other leading international economies, particularly the United States, have encountered similar issues and difficulties. I believe that in the United States, 23 per cent. of all projects are cancelled before they are completed, and only 28 per cent. are finished on time and budget with the expected functionality. We clearly have common challenges that we need to address.
	However, we are committed to learning from the past, to adopting best practice where it exists, and to attempting constantly to improve procurement techniques. For example, we have concluded that private finance initiatives are not suitable vehicles for IT projects. That is a significant example of how we have learned from the past. We do of course still believe it is important to work in partnership with the private sector, partly because of the skills and expertise that it offers to the public sector.
	The Office of Government Commerce has played an extremely valuable role in helping Departments to procure IT more sensibly. The OGC introduced new procedures to improve the delivery of all projects and programmes that depend on the implementation of new IT systems. Three features of these new procedures are worth highlighting, the first of which is the establishing of a project-programme management centre of excellence in each Department. These centres report to departmental management boards on progress in key programmes and projects to support effective decision making, to share information and lessons learned elsewhere in government, and to provide internal support to aid delivery.
	Secondly, each accounting officer is required to confirm that major IT-enabled projects do not suffer from the common causes of failure identified through OGC and National Audit Office experience. The NAO's contribution in this regard was particularly welcome. The third feature is the introduction of a requirement that no Government initiative that is dependent on new IT be announced before an analysis of the risks and the implementation options has been undertaken.
	These measures will go a long way towards raising procurement performance across government. I acknowledge the contribution and comments of the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, who said that it was only reasonable to give the Government a pat on the back for the work of the OGC. The OGC constitutes a very significant development in IT procurement and elsewhere, and it is only right that we should recognise its role, while not being complacent about the issues that will affect us in future.

Richard Allan: It is very welcome that assessments of the IT implications will be made before policies are announced, but will the Financial Secretary deal with the point that was made by the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), among others, about the publication of such information? In considering policy initiatives in the House, it would be extremely helpful to have that information before us, instead of guessing it or picking it up from the computer press.

Ruth Kelly: I was about to turn to the publication of the OGC gateway reviews, about which I know the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) feels extremely strongly. My hon. Friend the Economic Secretary considered this issue in a previous debate, and although I acknowledge that there are differing views on each side of the argument, I shall make the same point that he doubtless made then. I have been involved in gateway reviews on a number of occasions, and I can say that the OGC reviews are conducted on a confidential basis. The process involving the OGC and the Department is extremely open. The OGC, which has the ability to disseminate best practice across government, helps and advises the Department when it has a project to deliver, and it is right that, once the Department owns that project, such information be kept confidential. If we took confidentiality away from the discussions we would not have such open and honest negotiations. Lessons would not be learned to the same extent, and the value added by the process could be significantly diminished.

Richard Bacon: Does the Financial Secretary agree that the evidence is overwhelming that lessons are not being learned, as the history of the past 20 years has shown? I have made the point clearly that parties of both political complexions have suffered from this problem. The Financial Secretary says that the discussions between the Department and the OGC are very open. That is okay, but what about the suppliers? How can the situation be acceptable if suppliers do not even know that a gateway review is taking place? What is the Treasury afraid of?

Ruth Kelly: This is a question of learning from experience, and I can assure the hon. Gentleman that such lessons are being taken on board. He has given examples of projects going back 15 years or more, and we do of course share the concern that he and other Members have expressed this afternoon about performance in relation to IT procurement. We are determined to improve and the OGC process is a vital contribution to the debate. On the particular issue of a new statutory framework, I can tell the hon. Member for South Norfolk that I am committed to taking away this interesting proposal and looking into it further. He will understand that I cannot give an instant answer to that proposition, but I commit myself to writing to him about his interesting suggestion.
	I hope that that illustrates the fact that we are committed to learning from experience. We are open to new ideas about how to take this forward. I believe that the OGC process has been and is valuable, and that some of its fruits may not be felt for many years to come, but will be significant in the future.
	Many other issues have been raised in the debate and hon. Members will understand that I do not have time to respond to them all. Some concern individual Departments. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Pollok asked about the sheep regime and it is important to pass his question on to the appropriate Department, and the same applies to the points made about the Home Office building. The Home Office response highlighted the positive contribution that the new building will make to its operation in the future. It is something that is quite hard to quantify and to take into account—and the same applies to other points.
	We have had a valuable and useful debate. It has been stimulating and enjoyable, demonstrating the value of the Public Accounts Committee's work in adding to the process of parliamentary scrutiny. I look forward to the Committee continuing its extremely valuable work throughout the coming year.

Edward Leigh: I would like to add my thanks to all members of the Committee for what they have said in today's debate and, indeed, for serving on it. I shall run through them quickly.
	First, the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg) is, with his humour and his knowledge, an extraordinarily valuable member of the Committee. In a particularly brutal hearing on tax credits, he reminded the chairman of the Inland Revenue, Sir Nick Montague, that he had received more letters on the subject than any other, apart from fox hunting. Quick as a flash, Sir Nicholas replied:
	"I have to be thankful for small mercies, Mr. Steinberg. Fox hunting is not a subject about which you write to me."
	We are very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his contribution to our Committee.
	We are also grateful for the wise counsel of the soon-to-be Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who keeps us on the straight and narrow and reminds us when we are in danger of veering away from the ancient precedents of our venerable Committee. He is another extraordinarily valuable member. What he said today about benchmarking was important and we should take it away with us. The point was reiterated by the hon. Member for Glasgow, Pollok (Mr. Davidson). We should have more international comparisons; we are too insular in our work.
	I would also like to thank my two hon. Friends—if I may put it that way—the Members for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) and for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) for their extraordinarily skilful speeches on IT. I did not lose the will to live during their speeches. They are not anoraks, but are contributing a great deal to saving many tens of millions of pounds. We will have to return to the issue of gateway reviews. We may be able to debate it further in our Committee. We have also spoken today about how best to publicise findings and how to avoid the eternal reiteration of mistakes, about which Karl Popper spoke, as mentioned in the debate.
	The hon. Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas) spoke well about the central paradox that the Committee has to deal with—the efficiency of the public sector. Somehow in our Committee, if nowhere else in the House of Commons, we manage to avoid it becoming a party political issue. It is something on which we can all agree, whatever our views—that we have to make the public sector far more efficient than it has been under this Government, under the previous Government and, indeed, under any Government.
	I would also like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Mr. Flight), who did a feisty canter across the ground and injected a little bit of party politics into the debate—and what is wrong with that?
	I also thank the Minister for being a member of our Committee, even though she cannot turn up for sittings. We are very grateful for all her work.
	Finally, I am grateful for the very kind personal appreciation that the hon. Member for Tamworth (Mr. Jenkins) gave me. He is the hardest working member of our Committee and we are all very grateful to him.
	This has been a good debate and we will carry on our work.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Resolved,
	That this House takes note of the 1st to the 16th, and the 18th and 19th Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2003–04, and of the Treasury Minutes and the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel Memorandum on these Reports, Cm 6130, 6136, 6155, 6175, 6191 and 6244.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Ainger.]

Vera Baird: Two women a week are killed by violent partners. Thirty men a year are killed by their battered partners. Many of the men and women charged with those killings put up the defence of provocation. If the jury accepts it, they will be convicted only of manslaughter and not of murder. In those circumstances, the punishment is not a mandatory life sentence, but is at the judge's discretion.
	The Government are undecided about whether to change the law on provocation imminently. I shall set out what happens under the current law.
	In domestic killings, men kill because of anger and sexual jealousy. Women kill because of abuse. I have defended many women over the past decade who have killed their partners, and I have never come across one who has killed from sexual jealousy or anger. The women whom I have defended have killed only after being beaten and abused, sometimes for years.
	In the defence of provocation, the defendant says that the killing was done during a sudden and temporary loss of self-control caused by things said or done by the victim, and in circumstances in which a reasonable person might have reacted as the defendant did.
	The point of the defence is that although the defendant has killed, his blameworthiness for overreacting is mitigated by the provocation from the victim. Originally, the defence required the provocative conduct to be wrong. The philosophy behind provocation—that its presence reduces the blameworthiness of killing—would not make sense if a victim did only what she had a right to do, or if she was not wrong to do it.
	As long ago as the 19th century, judges thought it a misuse of the defence of provocation to say that a man was provoked to kill when his wife left him. They had a power to withdraw the defence from the jury's consideration when it was levelled against rightful acts, or acts that were not wrong. In such circumstances, the judges did withdraw the defence. Of course a woman has a right to leave a man if she does not want to live with him. He can divorce her but he cannot kill her, unless he wants to be convicted of murder.
	However, in this century the requirement that the provocation must be wrong in some way has disappeared. One man was acquitted of murder when he claimed that he had been provoked to kill by a baby crying.
	In recent years, there have been cases in which women have been killed and men have said that they were provoked to lose their self-control by nagging. For one man, the final provocation was the way that the woman moved the mustard pot across the table. In a case in Leeds, the defence of provocation was successful in a case in which a man had killed his wife not because she had left him but because she had told him that she was thinking of leaving him and going to live with her gym trainer.
	We must remember that there are two parts to the defence of provocation. It does not work unless, in addition to showing provocative conduct, the defendant shows that a reasonable person might have reacted to that conduct as the defendant did. Surely killing a partner for moving the mustard pot in a certain way and saying that she fancies her gym teacher is not the reaction of a reasonable person, so how did it come about that these men were acquitted?
	The culprit is the House of Lords. In the case of Morgan James Smith in 2000, the Lords said that, when considering whether a reasonable person might have reacted to the provocation as the defendant did, all the characteristics of the defendant must be taken into account. Clearly, to be fair, one must consider whether a reasonable person of the same age might have reacted in the same way, as self-control goes with maturity. However, in the Smith case it was stated that all the defendant's characteristics have to be taken into account, including any that might lower his standards of self-control below the ordinary.
	For that reason, a defendant's bad temper and alcoholism are his characteristics and must be taken into account when consideration is given to whether any reasonable person would have done as he did. Therefore, one is supposed to impute the fine characteristics of the reasonable person, and then ask whether a reasonable person who is bad tempered and alcoholic might have behaved as the defendant did.
	However, if one imputes the defendant's characteristics to the reasonable person, the reasonable person turns into the defendant. Therefore, the question of whether a reasonable person—who has now become the defendant—might have reacted as the defendant did is meaningless, as there is no second requirement. At present, there is no need for conduct to be wrong to be called provocation, trivial behaviour cannot be withdrawn from the jury by the judge, and there is no second requirement at all. Add it all together and the only question left for the jury in a provocation defence is whether he lost his self-control because of something she did. If so, he has a defence. That is hopeless. It offers no protection or rational basis for jury decisions. In addition, what does it say to her children or parents if the state says that his blame is less and she bears responsibility for her own killing because she moved the mustard pot?
	The typical killing by a battered woman is not from anger and does not fit the sudden and temporary loss of self-control model of provocation. Almost all such killings take place when she is under attack. She flees into the kitchen, he comes after her, she seizes a knife, she turns and she stabs him once. There is no defence of killing out of fear or despair that accommodates battered women in the way that provocation and killing out of anger accommodates men. However, there is far more emotional and psychological stress to justify a finding of less blameworthiness if someone kills after long tolerance of harsh wrong treatment, rather than suddenly in anger.
	One might think that the run into the kitchen and the turn round under attack is self-defence, but it is excessive. To be a defence, self-defence must be proportionate. If a woman is attacked only with fist or boot and even if the man is stronger and has used violence before, if she takes a weapon, lashes out and kills him, the jury will not acquit her on self-defence. It is excessive. It is disproportionate. Excessive or disproportionate self-defence leads to a conviction for murder, not for manslaughter. If I overreact to provocation, as a man may do, it is manslaughter. If I overreact to being attacked, as a woman may do, it is murder.
	Women in court are now defended on two bases. First, the defence tries arguing that the act was proportionate self-defence. Secondly, if that fails, she falls back on the claim that the attack provoked her into a sudden and temporary loss of self-control that would have caused a reasonable person to do as she did and kill. But proportionality in the first defence of self-defence requires measurement and deliberation. The defence of provocation requires a sudden and temporary loss of self-control and a lashing out—an overreaction. It requires that a person has acted disproportionately. The two defences are inconsistent.
	Women do not fit the hot-tempered provocation model into which one tries to squeeze them. The jury can see perfectly well that the woman is outside provocation and that she has not killed from anger at a wrong, but in terror and despair at yet another beating. So both defences usually fail, and thus do violent men who lose their self-control get away with murder and battered women get convicted of it. That is unjust. It is also sexist. The Government will introduce a duty on public authorities to promote gender equality, but the courts, which have to implement the current law on provocation and manslaughter, will not be able to comply.
	The Government know well that the need to reform the law is urgent and they have asked the Law Commission to consider the issue and make proposals. The Law Commission has done so. I am told by Mr. Justice Toulson that the proposals are unlikely to change and have been well received, with few exceptions, by the judiciary and by academics. I can say that the Fawcett Society, Justice for Women, Rights of Women, Southall Black Sisters, Women's Aid and all the women's lobby groups who deal with the issue are 100 per cent. behind the proposals.
	The purpose in asking the Law Commission to look at provocation was to consider legislation, so the terms of reference asked for special attention to domestic violence. However, the Law Commission has worked out a defence for all manslaughter to an outstanding level, which goes much wider than the terms of reference. The calibre of the proposals is very good. Under them, unlawful homicide that would otherwise be murder would be manslaughter if the defendant acted in response to various factors. Change No. 1 is gross provocation, meaning words or conduct—or words and conduct—that caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged. That would restore the moral basis for provocation—that the conduct in question must be wrongful. The defendant would have to have legitimate grounds for feeling strongly aggrieved by the conduct of the person. The question of whether that was justifiable would be for the jury, not for the defendant. Gross provocation ups the level of conduct needed to arouse a justifiable sense of grievance. Anything less than gross, anything less than wrongful and the court will be able to withdraw the defence from the jury, because change No. 2 is that the judge will not be required to leave the defence to the jury unless there is evidence on which a reasonable jury, properly directed, could conclude that it might apply.
	Under change No. 3, homicide that would otherwise be murder would be manslaughter instead if the act was carried out from fear of serious violence, so the woman under attack in the kitchen would not have to pretend that she acted out of loss of self-control; she will be protected if she acted from fear of serious violence. Of course, before the jury looks at that partial defence it will have to look at self-defence, where that has been raised, but if it finds that the defence was disproportionate it will ask whether it was too much because the woman was afraid.
	It is a measure of how fair and realistic the report is, and of how commendable it is, that the Royal College of Psychiatrists gave evidence to the Law Commission, challenging the assumption that anger—the male emotion—cannot be a justification for responsive violence, while fear—the female emotion—can be. The RCP pointed out that the two emotions of anger and fear are not distinct and that physiologically anger and fear are identical. Many mental states that accompany killing also incorporate psychologically both anger and fear. Hence the abused woman who kills in response even to an immediate severe threat will be driven at least partly by anger at the years of abuse meted out to her and perhaps to her children.
	Change No. 4, homicide that would otherwise be murder, can be reduced to manslaughter by a combination of gross provocation causing a justifiable sense of wrong and fear. Morally, of course, the common element is that it is a response to bad conduct. The person would not kill at all had they not been attacked.
	Even if there is gross provocation engendering a justifiable sense of wrong it by no means follows that an ordinary person would have reacted in the way that the defendant did. Most people suffer gross provocation from time to time but they do not kill. The final change is that the defence would be available only if a person of ordinary self-control in the circumstances of the defendant might have reacted in the same or a similar way. That would still take into account all the defendant's characteristics, such as age, but not matters that bear simply on his capacity for self-control—so no more bad temper, no more alcohol.
	A man or a woman, seriously wronged, justifiably feeling that they have been seriously wronged and exercising ordinary self-control, but who kills will have that defence. Women, killing under serious fear of violence, will also have that defence. All will become far more equal. The case for change is overwhelming. The Law Commission's proposals are rational, clear, just—not sexist—and fair. They can be put into the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill through an amendment that has already been tabled, so this is my sole question to my hon. Friend the Minister: why not?

Paul Goggins: I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) for initiating this important debate. To the long list of attributes that we associate with my hon. and learned Friend we can now add stamina, as she and I, as well as the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Kali Mountford), who are also in the Chamber, have been discussing the detail of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill since about 10 past nine this morning.
	My hon. and learned Friend speaks with great experience and authority on these extremely important issues. As she said, two women are killed every week by a male partner, or former partner, while about 30 men are killed by a female partner, or former partner, each year. Getting the criminal law right is essential to deal justly with such cases and an important part of getting domestic violence fully recognised for the serious offence that it is.
	The Government have sought to engage the public on these issues, setting out our proposals in "Safety and Justice", which was published just a year ago in June 2003, and introducing the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill in this Session of Parliament. It is vital that we get the law right and that we deal with the perpetrators, as well as find and develop practical ways to provide effective help and support for victims.
	The Government fully recognise and share the concern about the way in which the law on homicide operates in relation to domestic violence cases. In particular, we understand the concern that recent developments in the law have led to an extension of the scope and availability of the partial defence to murder of provocation well beyond what was envisaged in section 3 of the Homicide Act 1957. Those developments have allowed a subjective test for provocation, based on the defendant's characteristics, rather than the more objective test of what a reasonable reaction to the provocation would be. My hon. and learned Friend outlined very graphically the impact of that on individual families.
	Of course sexual jealousy, however much it may enrage the person who suffers from it, should never be seen as a justification for killing someone; nor should infidelity be an excuse for taking someone's life, however devastating it may be. There is also a deep worry that current sentencing in relation to manslaughter by reason of provocation in cases of domestic violence homicides does not adequately reflect their seriousness and the loss of life involved.
	The Government agree that the current position on provocation is unsustainable. Indeed, for that reason, we asked the Sentencing Advisory Panel to consider the sentencing issues and the Law Commission to analyse provocation as a partial defence. The Law Commission was the right body to do that. It is eminent in law reform and respected in legal circles and more widely. It has been able to research this issue thoroughly and provide a very detailed legal analysis of the present law and the options for reform.
	In addition, the Law Commission has been able to canvass a wide range of views and opinions, consulting extensively across the appropriate groups and individuals. My hon. and learned Friend named some of the organisations, such as Southall Black Sisters, Justice for Women, the Women's Aid Federation of England, Rights of Women and, indeed, the Fawcett Society, in which she plays such a prominent role. All those organisations have provided useful information about the problem. Their insight will be vital in ensuring that we deal with the right issues and find solutions that really work.
	This concern is not new. We highlighted our concerns about the law on provocation generally and the particular problem with domestic homicides in the "Safety and Justice" domestic violence consultation paper that I referred to earlier. Indeed, the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill, currently in Committee, contains important measures to help to tackle the evil that is domestic violence. Those measures include making common assault an arrestable offence; making breach of non-molestation orders a criminal offence; establishing domestic homicide reviews; and strengthening provisions on restraining orders, including making them available on acquittal. All those important changes demonstrate our total commitment to dealing with such crime with all the severity that it properly deserves.
	In "Safety and Justice", we identified two strands to the problem with the way that the law on provocation works at present: first, the problem with the way the law has developed since Morgan Smith, to which my hon. and learned Friend referred, and the subjective interpretation of provocation provided by that case; and secondly, the problem with sentencing. It is true that a good part of the problem lies on the sentencing side. There is a large gap in the sentences given in cases of murder and manslaughter. Murder receives a mandatory life sentence, with a starting point of at least 15 years, as established in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Although manslaughter can attract a discretionary life sentence, sentences in practice are generally of determinate length and, for domestic homicides, will usually attract a sentence of four to eight years' imprisonment.
	Under current licence arrangements, the defendant can expect to serve two thirds of such a sentence, so the difference in time actually served can be very large indeed. That puts great weight on the partial defences, because the consequences can be so significant. For that reason, we asked the Sentencing Advisory Panel to examine sentencing when provocation reduces a charge of murder to a conviction for manslaughter, especially when the offence arises in a domestic context. Its analysis, which was published in its consultation paper, shows clearly how wide the sentencing gap is at present. Nevertheless, its proposals would place most cases of manslaughter by provocation—whether or not in a domestic context—in the medium or low ranges of seriousness. That would give starting points of six or two years respectively and would, in practice, do little to address the present sentencing gap.
	The next stage for the Sentencing Advisory Panel, following an assessment of the responses to the consultation, will be for it to put proposals to the new Sentencing Guidelines Council, with the final guidelines ultimately coming before Parliament for debate. We are keen for all those with an interest to engage in the process and hope that that will ensure the development of appropriate guidance that reflects both justice and fairness.
	As regards the partial defence itself and the formulation of the criminal law, we are concerned, as I said, about domestic homicides in which the alleged provocation is due to sexual jealousy or infidelity, for it is in such cases that raising the partial defence often involves an attack on the victim's reputation. We know that that can be extremely traumatic for the family. Understandably, they will perceive that the verdict, or acceptance of a plea, in such circumstances means that the victim was to blame for his or her death. We need to tackle that, so the Law Commission's work could be helpful. My hon. and learned Friend outlined the provisional proposals in detail. They would remove the concept of loss of self-control, so that could no longer form the basis of a defence, and substitute fear of serious violence and words or conduct that caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being wronged as the grounds for defence.
	Even within the context of domestic violence, however, the proposals have major implications that require careful thought. In particular, the concept of a justifiable sense of being wronged could have unintended implications. Of course, we cannot limit the debate to that context alone. As I said earlier, this area of the law is important in relation to domestic violence, but the importance of provocation goes much wider.
	Partial defences to murder, including provocation, provide the boundary line between murder and manslaughter across homicide offences in general, so we need to look at the law for all homicides. Our aim must be to find a balanced solution that will address the differing types of homicide coherently while providing public confidence that the law is fair and right. In such a complex area of the law, the potential for unintended consequences is huge.
	I should make it clear that we do not think that the option of a defence only for cases of domestic violence would work. There is no definition of domestic violence in law and, as we have been debating in Committee, there are good reasons for that. For a start, it would be difficult to reach a clearly agreed firm definition. The criminal law must provide certainty about its scope, but how would that work for domestic violence homicides? Violence between partners would clearly be covered, but what about casual relationships between two people who had perhaps met only that day or earlier in the same week? Where would we draw the line? What about child homicides, perhaps following a prolonged period of physical or sexual abuse? There would need to be a convincing reason why people who committed the same basic offence, but in different contexts, would have different defences available to them.
	I want to consider briefly what the Law Commission proposes in the wider context of homicide as a whole. Its provisional proposals have some attractive features, but they would represent a major change from the way in which the law works at present. At present, provocation provides an excuse for homicide because although an offender killed, that can be partially excused because he lost control. However, the courts have stretched that to take account of the very different position for women who kill. Under the Law Commission proposal, the killing would be deemed partially justified in certain circumstances, which is a very significant change indeed with far-reaching ramifications. We need to consider how it would work, not just in the domestic violence context, where there could be difficult areas such as "honour" killings, but in other circumstances. For example, it might be possible to argue that some gangland killings meet the criteria. We need to reflect on that major issue of principle and policy in criminal law. It would certainly be irresponsible to adopt such a radical change too quickly. We also have to look with great care at the balance between providing a defence that is subjectively based on the defendant's characteristics and making the defence wholly objectively based. That needs to be debated fully to ensure that we reach a solution that commands public confidence in the rule of law.
	The Law Commission is still working on its final report. Its proposals have been strongly welcomed by some groups, although areas of particular concern have also been identified. We must make sure that it has the time to complete its work fully, analyse the responses and take them on board. Moreover, we need to take a comprehensive look at the underlying principles, as this is not an area for quick decisions. The Law Commission's thorough analysis will be crucial in helping us to clarify our understanding of the issues involved. The present law was put in place in 1957, and we need to undertake careful reflection and study the Law Commission's proposals in depth before we set it aside. Given that legislating on provocation is a complex area of law, it clearly makes good sense to await the final report by the Law Commission. We will then look at its recommendations carefully before we consider taking legislative action. We will need to ensure that we have checked the full intended consequences of the proposed changes, and that we have picked up any unintended consequences.
	I believe that at this stage it is too early to legislate. We have more work to do if we are to get this important issue right, and we are all too aware of the problems created by rushed legislative change. The Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill is a crucial further step in the Government's determined efforts to deal with the horror of domestic violence. Further development of our thinking on provocation and the changes to the law that may be required should be undertaken with great care to ensure that we get it right.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Adjourned accordingly at twenty-seven minutes past Seven o'clock.